It’s hard enough to try to get your groundbreaking scientific discoveries taken seriously when they go against the conventional wisdom laid down by the great minds of yore. But trying to do this when you’re also a woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated field, and at a time when women still aren’t allowed to vote? Good luck with that.
Silent Sky is one of several plays that San Francisco’s Lauren Gunderson has written about scientists, and female scientists in particular. Like her earlier play Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight, which South Coast Rep premiered in 2009 and Symmetry Theatre Company brought to the Bay Area in 2012, this one’s also about a brilliant real-life historical scientist struggling against sexism and accepted orthodoxy to gain recognition for her discoveries. But, again like Emilie, it’s also about the hunger for knowledge for knowledge’s sake, the tension between that obsessive work and personal relationships, and the frustration of there never being enough time in a life to truly finish what you started, having to leave others to carry on your work.
Elena Wright, Sarah Dacey Charles and Lynne Soffer in Silent Sky; photo: Tracy Martin.
This one’s about Henrietta Leavitt, an astronomer at the turn of the 20th century. Employed at the Harvard College Observatory as a “computer,” doing the busywork of cataloguing and labeling the stars captured in photographic plates, Leavitt determined a way of measuring the rhythms of stars whose intensity of light fluctuated, making it possible for those who followed her to measure the distance to stars and galaxies and get the first real sense of the size of the universe. All this she did despite being forbidden, as a woman, to use the observatory’s telescope herself.
This is the latest in a steady stream of Bay Area productions by Gunderson, who premiered plays with Marin Theatre Company, Crowded Fire Theater and Shotgun Players last year and has another premiere coming up at San Francisco Playhouse in March. Unlike most of her other recent Bay Area productions, Silent Sky is not a world premiere but a second production (it debuted at South Coast Rep in 2011), and that’s a good thing. It’s one of Gunderson’s more complete and polished works, and whatever work has been done on the script since its first production seems to have done it good.