Prolific author Lauren Gunderson has in several years had the distinction of being named "America's most produced living playwright". Her multi-award-winning scripts include Silent Sky which is on stage at the Wetumpka Depot for the next two weekends. Ms. Gunderson most often focuses on pioneering women in history, literature, and science who address the challenges they face in a male dominated world.
Sensitively directed by Kim Mason [one of the River Region's most accomplished thespians], Silent Sky is based on the true story of Henrietta Leavitt who, in the early 20th Century, left her home in Wisconsin to take a job at a Harvard University astronomy lab. Eager to get to work, she finds that all the women in the "harem" so employed merely record and catalogue the data that the men get credit for, and has no chance of actually engaging meaningfully in mapping the stars by using the telescope forbidden to them.
A tight ensemble of actors inhabit their roles with conviction, as Gunderson tracks Henrietta's audacious persistence in achieving new astronomical discoveries that changed the ways in which modern science views the cosmos, the earth, and the ways in which humankind exists in it.
Make no mistake, audiences are meant to be on Henrietta's side from the very beginning. In the role, Hillary Taylor is both a radical and a traditional homebody whose decision to leave Wisconsin is hard for her sister Margaret [Meagan Tuck] to understand and accept. And when she meets the other women at the lab -- brusque and rigid Annie [Tammy Arvidson] and compassionate Scottish Williamina [Layne Holley] -- she has colleagues who teach her the rules and later become complicit in her breaking them.
Though she expected to meet and work hand in hand with the professor who heads the project, she is met by his assistant Peter [Ethan Montgomery], whose almost robotic pronouncements about the lab work and the distinctions between the roles of men and women cause Henrietta to do everything in her power to break the rules and get some credit.
Predictably, a romance begins between them [an invention of the playwright], and serves to humanize both of the characters. -- Mr. Montgomery's persistent stuttering evokes one of the most convincingly disarming proclamations of love: a credit to the playwright, the director, the acting partners in the scene.
The play delves into the discoveries of an emerging astronomical science, feminism and women's suffrage, the sacrifices people make for family and career, and the legacy of important figures in our history, and makes them resonate over time.
Played on a simple set with a stunning cyclorama backdrop, and clothed in period character driven costumes by Ryan Sozzi and wigs by Hannah Lunt, Silent Sky draws audiences into Henrietta's world and the human complications she maneuvers, making for a stunning evening at the Wetumpka Depot.
