Silent Sky at BCT

Or: Constellations

From the void, it forms. A whole galaxy, a whole life, coalesces on the BCT stage. Under Tracy Sunderland’s direction, stars and refracting mirrors, a universe of dark wood and points of light (designed by Erin Davidson), swirl about, the actors themselves practicing the movements of their characters (and desk choreography), joining and splitting, and posing. Everything phases from one moment, one thought, one action to another, which is an interesting choice for a script marked by its precision.

Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson is one of those stories you don’t have to hoist: like the best plays it stands on its own and a creative company can stretch whatever they like upon it. Gunderson’s script is the best of her style: the mix of science and sensibility, wit and passion, the immortal and the deeply personal. Telling the story of Henrietta Leavitt (Tiara Thompson), an astronomer and living “computer” in the early 1900s, it is a play sparking with humor and sweetness, elegant in its flow, and truly cements the work and soul of a woman who made one of the greatest discoveries of the heavens.

Leavitt and her Harvard colleagues Williamina Fleming (Marissa Price) and Annie Cannon (Donna Jean Fogel) spend their days plotting the stars (their meticulous work echoed by the set and lights) but also bind together as friends, each of them stifled by the institution that runs on their labor but will give them neither pay nor credit for their discovery. Price and Fogel form in their performance a binary star: playing off each other and doubling their radiance. Fogel’s crisp and armored professionalism warms under the steady heat of Price’s Scottish charm, both of them bringing out the best in Peter Shaw (David Kepner), the department’s nominal supervisor and Henrietta’s enemy to idiot to lover. Kepner, full of polished awkwardness, candy sweet and candy brittle, magnifies Peter’s social torment by keeping under the surface never crashing into histrionics (though when he wants to cut, he can draw blood.)

Thompson draws the attention of the play to Henrietta. An engine of discovery, Henrietta’s grief and wonder, are interior things held at arm’s length, her words and actions carefully stitched together, always out of step but still composed of titanic will; half of her mind is always on higher things. She shines best against her sister Margaret (Tess Makena), the woman who chose to stay behind with her feet on the ground. Makena’s performance flows with the text, showing that while Margaret may be less of a visionary than her sister, she’s no less brilliant. A counterpoint to the story who lets her sister spin around her, Makena flips her character’s grief, and pride and exasperation to garner the most laughs in a cast brimming with wits.

As much as it is a story of precision: in speech and feeling, and science, Silent Sky is also a story of phasing. Our understanding broadens, our time slips out of our grasp and we are just as mysterious to our fellows as the most distant star is. So perhaps the making of constellations, the slow shifting gestures, drawing pictures in light, might bring out the right tone of a remarkable play.