Silent Sky Program

Silent Sky

By Lauren Gunderson

Directed by Tom Dugdale

The performance runs 90 minutes with a 15-minute intermission.

Cast

Henrietta Leavitt
Gabriella Johnson

Margaret Leavitt
Marina Sepulveda

Annie Cannon
Hailey Zitser

Williamina Fleming
Marta Minarik

Peter Shaw
Nathaniel Criss

Understudies

Henrietta Leavitt
Isabella Sanchez

Margaret Leavitt
Kalee Sribanditmongkol

Wiliamina Fleming and Annie Cannon
Alison Lohr

Peter Shaw
Colin Barberic

Silent Sky is presented by special arrangement with Broadway Licensing, LLC, servicing the Dramatists Play Service collection. (www.dramatists.com)

The use of any recording device, either audio or video, and the taking of photographs, either with or without flash, is strictly prohibited. Please silence your cell phones and pagers prior to the beginning of the performance. In consideration of those seated around you, please refrain from texting during the performance.

Colin Barberic (Peter Shaw Understudy), 1st-year student
Pronouns: he/him
Hometown: Medina, OH
Major(s): theatre; philosophy, politics, and economics
Minor(s): Spanish
Department Productions: debut

Sarah Cole (dramaturg), graduate student
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Athens, GA
Major(s): theatre
Department Productions: Men on Boats

Nathaniel Criss (Peter Shaw), senior
Pronouns: he/him
Hometown: Grove City, OH
Major(s): communication technology
Minor(s): theatre
Department Productions: debut

Maddie Green (production stage manager), sophomore
Hometown: Springboro, OH
Major(s): English; theatre
Minor(s): history
Department Productions: first department production

Gabriella Johnson (Henrietta Leavitt), senior
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Aurora, CO
Major(s): social work
Minor(s): theatre
Department Productions: In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play); Everybody; Blood Wedding

Olivia Kroh (asst. director), graduate student
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Mandan, ND
Major(s): theatre
Department Productions: 1st department production

Alison Lohr (Williamina Fleming and Annie Cannon Understudy), junior
Hometown: Akron, OH
Major(s): sociology
Minor(s): theatre
Department Productions: debut

Marta Minarik (Williamina Fleming), 1st-year student
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Cleveland, OH
Major(s): finance
Department Productions: debut

Iz Nichols (lighting designer), senior
Pronouns: they/them
Hometown: Columbus, OH
Major(s): theatre
Minor(s): studio art
Department Productions: Sweat; Violet; The Seagull; Men on Boats

Isabella Sanchez (Henrietta Leavitt Understudy), junior
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Westchester, NY
Major(s): marketing
Minor(s): musical theatre
Department Productions: debut

Marina Sepulveda (Margaret Leavitt), sophomore
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Youngstown, OH
Major(s): psychology
Minor(s): Spanish; theatre
Department Productions: Everybody

Victoria Smith (asst. director; intimacy captain), graduate student
Pronouns: she/they
Hometown: Greensburg, PA
Major(s): theatre
Department Productions: 1st department production

Kalee Sribanditmongkol (Margarett Leavitt Understudy), 1st-year student
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Gahanna, OH
Major(s): theatre
Minor(s): musical theatre; voice acting
Department Productions: debut

Hailey Zitser (Annie Cannon), 1st-year student
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Durham, NC
Major(s): communications; theatre
Department Productions: debut

“Darling, we are in the business of perspective. You know it's fundamentally hard to tell if something is big and bright… or just close by.”—Williamina Fleming, Act II, Scene 1

In 1995, the Hubble Telescope took the first photo of an interstellar mass called The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula. Search the photo, and you will see ethereal columns of ocher dust. Whisps of gas against a murky and shadowed expanse. Tantalizing. Intimate. Ours. On a small screen in our hands, we feel as if we could easily slip into their midst and swim in the sea of stars. Have we forgotten what it was like as a child to look up into the night sky and wonder in awe at all of it?

To the astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, stars were small pinpricks of light in distant, unexplored space that held more mysteries than answers. She lived her life with an unceasing devotion to seeking truths in the cosmos. Today, we acknowledge her as the first person to measure distance in our galaxy. So, why is she largely unknown outside of the astronomical community?

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Harvard University Observatory was the center of the astronomical universe. Under the direction of Dr. Edward Pickering, the observatory pioneered humanity’s first spectrometry measurements, mapping the night sky with photographs captured from the Great Refractor Telescope. The large brunt of the work was accomplished by women “computers” that Pickering hired to identify and record star data from glass plates bearing the telescope images. These women (some housekeepers, mothers, and sisters, and suffragettes) were brilliant mathematicians and astronomers. The men in the department, like the broader academic community, viewed them as lesser contributors to the field and simple clerical aids. Pickering even referred to the group as “girls in a math harem.” Despite the immense inequality and sexism in the workplace, the women engaged in crucial work: discerning the material nature of stars, creating the first stellar classification model, and identifying thousands of cepheids and nebulae.

In Silent Sky, Lauren Gunderson calls us as the audience to see the characters in Silent Sky are not merely astronomers but dreamers, thinkers, and agents of change. Women who fearlessly asked their world, opposed to their hopes and ambitions, for something more, even if they would never live to see it.

Henrietta never got a chance to know the answers that she asked of her cosmos. She passed away just two years before 1923, the year Edwin Hubble used her calculations to prove that our universe extends far beyond the Milky Way and that there are whole other galaxies outside of ours.

As Gunderson invites us into Henrietta’s world, she suggests that we have a special gift. We can be participants in this great Answering. She suggests the audience is the final ingredient in a performance. We are the missing element of the story.

This play is a journey of perspective, and yours matters to how we will make meaning together. Henrietta asks of her heaven: How do we know what matters in this vast, seemingly unknowable universe?

Tonight, you search with her.

How might you answer her call?