Galactic visionary to bring life story to stage
Pioneer stargazer inspires scientists to shoot for stars
Kelly Ground (right), director of “Silent Sky,” makes final alterations to Henrietta Leavitt’s (Clove Galilee) coat during a dress rehearsal in the Knox Center on Thursday.
April 28, 2015
“Silent Sky” opens Thursday night in the Knox Center for the Performing Arts and will run through Saturday, with performances each night beginning at 8 p.m.
A preview will take place tonight at 8 p.m. for a discounted ticket price of $5, and there will be a matinee performance on Saturday at 2 p.m. For each performance taking place on or after Thursday, general admission is $15 per guest and $10 for students with a student ID.
Play director Kelly Ground based her decision to direct and produce “Silent Sky” in part because she was asking herself what would work in the constraints of the Knox Center. Her other influence is award-winning playwright and author of “Silent Sky” Lauren Gunderson, is an acquaintance of hers. Gunderson is based locally and teaches screenwriting in San Francisco, Ground said.
Vicky Kagawan-Zabarte, who plays the role of Leavitt’s sister Annie, was surprised to learn that her character “named more than 350,000 stars in the universe and classified them by their colors.”
In this play, we see Leavitt at her familial home with her sister near Harvard’s Observatory working with her associates to make astronomical discoveries, and with her supervisor, Peter, with whom she had a romantic episode.
The cast could not be a more congenial group of people who are seriously dedicated to their craft, Ground said.
Student Clove Galilee said she was inspired to audition for the lead in “Silent Sky” because of “the groundbreaking research on astronomy made by Leavitt. I am astounded at how versatile she was as a volunteer, mathematician, scientist and intellectual and how her work contributed to understanding how the universe works.”
Prior to Henrietta Leavitt’s work at Harvard Observatory, there was no Hubble Space Telescope, nor much information about how to count stars. Her innovative work on measuring the darkness or brightness of stars from telescopic photos and pairing them with their negatives gave the modern world of astronomy a new method, Ground said.
Hubble uses this same method today.
Ground said that each person will like this play for their own particular experience — “some might enjoy it for the possibilities and others for the science, but it really has something for just about everybody.”
Willamena is played by student Kaitlyn McCoy. McCoy has taken one astronomy class and said she loved it.
About being in “Silent Sky,” she said, “It’s more fun than it is time-consuming, and you learn a lot about yourself being part of a production like this.”
Adam Elder takes the only male role in the play: Peter.
Shirley Wilson • May 3, 2015 at 2:15 pm
I wanted to like this story and the show, I went with friends and they wanted to like it too, but the story was too simple and the action too drawn out. It seemed like there was a lot of humor in the play but no laughs because it dragged while people just stood in one spot and talked like they didn’t know where the jokes are. I know the actor my friends know, she is very lively and funny but here they made her just stand still and talk. The guy was pretty good but he was the only one who was allowed to move and be entertaining. My friend said the problem was the director, I don’t know, I just kept trying to pay attention but it was hard to follow. Reminded me of an after school special or a history channel show but not as good.
Henrietta Levitt • May 1, 2015 at 3:44 pm
The actors meant well, but I saw this show last night and it’s been directed like a cheap musical. Actors stand in stiff groupings like statues in a Nativity scene. Speech is stilted, over-precise and artificial. Even the actors’ gestures seem to have been over-controlled by the director. Despite the huge facility (which was almost completely empty) and the elaborate technical resources, there were very few instruments lighting a dim stage in which the slow pacing, artificial speech and movement, and dull costumes created the perfect atmosphere for a nap. Also the theater was at first incredibly hot and then so cold that it was literally unbearable. A sad night for theater and a sad night for our community.