Silent Sky Brings Theater to St. Paul’s Bell Museum

Victoria Pyan as Henrietta Leavitt. Photo by Charles Gorrill

Planetariums are designed to inspire wonder. The overhead dome consumes our field of vision, the quiet darkness inspires our deepest thoughts like a prayer, the reclining chairs invite us to look skyward, and the leg room . . . you don’t realize how much sufficient legroom improves your viewing experience until you have it.

What planetariums are not built for is live dramatic theater. That’s the challenge that director Carin Bratlie Wethern and her team with Theatre Pro Rata faced with Silent Sky, the debut play in the Whitney and Elizabeth MacMillan Planetarium at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum. First you have to overcome the limits of such a space—one without “theatrical lighting instruments, a backstage, and space for scenery,” as Wethern points out in her director’s notes. Then you need to figure out how to get the most out of that big screen. Directing our attention skyward too much might distract from the actors. Neglecting the screen entirely risks making the whole thing feel more like a class exercise than an immersive story.

The first 90 minutes are an uneasy compromise, with the lower half of the screen filled by stock images of a farmhouse, a church, an observatory, the deck of a ship. At first I thought this matter-of-fact depiction of wherever the characters happen to be located in a given moment was a waste of the cosmos overhead. That changed during the final act. When Henrietta Leavitt’s groundbreaking astronomy work is finally mirrored by the full majesty of the universe, it feels earned, like we’re experiencing the reward for her hard (and often thankless) work alongside her. This play wasn’t written for this type of venue, and it’s not a perfect marriage, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine a more effective way to combine the two.

The actors fill the space with big, audible performances, running up and down stairs and stretching the small landing beneath the screen into a full-blown stage. Harvard astronomer Leavitt (Victoria Pyan) and her Wisconsin housewife sister, Margaret (Danielle Krivinchuk), trade letters about their increasingly divergent lives from opposite sides of the stage. Henrietta’s supervisor, Peter, bumbles all across the space as he’s deflected and teased by women clearly more qualified for his job. The show’s best moments come courtesy of Annie and Williamina (Amber Bjork and Sarah Broude), two of Henrietta’s coworkers, who trade barbs and crack jokes about their differing work ethics and the obvious unfairness of their male-dominated field.

It should surprise no one that Harvard in the early 20th century was not an ideal work environment for women. Lauren Gunderson’s script emphasizes how these astronomers (called computers—and, at one point, a “harem” by their male supervisors) toiled away thanklessly with the boring but necessary math while their male counterparts took credit for the big ideas. They weren’t even allowed to touch the telescope. Henrietta arrives at her major scientific epiphany only after years of sacrificing her time, her family, and her shot at romantic love—and even then her victory is only personal. Other scientists take credit for the results of her observations. Her reward, as her sister puts it, is that “You asked God a question, and he answered.”

The most powerful moments in Silent Sky deal with this conflict. Henrietta is passionate and curious and also being exploited by her male coworkers. But what other choice does she have? The play draws a lot of parallels between astronomy and life, and they’re not all equally poignant, but Henrietta finding the beauty in contributing her small part of the scientific puzzle while discovering how small Earth is in the puzzle of the universe feels like a novel piece of wisdom.

Amber Bjork, Victoria Pyan, and Sarah Broude as Annie, Henrietta, and Williamina. Photo by Charles Gorrill

The rest of the story is more familiar. Henrietta leaves her family and everything she knows to achieve her dream, arrives at a hostile workplace, teams up with some wisecracking comic-relief characters, perseveres against conflict, falls in love. There’s a predictability to this arc at odds with the groundbreaking search for the literal size of the universe. There’s no rule that says every moment in a biography has to feel original, but sometimes it felt like these specific choices (like Henrietta’s sister guilting her about not writing home more) didn’t need to be about Henrietta Leavitt. You could copy and paste the stories of many people who persevered against the odds into this exact outline. Indeed, many writers have.

And yet the final moments still pack an emotional punch, because these feelings are real. Henrietta’s passion is real. Her contribution is real. The pain of her erasure is real. As a standalone experience, Silent Sky is a fine, if predictable, two hours carried by its actors and occasionally benefiting from a big honking dome that projects the stars—but the act of telling the stories of women like Henrietta Leavitt who discovered the size of the universe remains as poignant and powerful as ever.