This issue has…

• 💻 A Computer on the Brink
  you and me both, computer

• 🎤 An Interview with Amanda
  she’s directing Silent Sky after all

• ✏ A New Crossword
  brush up your skillzzzz

THEATRE

A play about the vastness of love…

As our next adult theatre production prepares to open TOMORROW (have your tix yet?), I thought it would be fun to sit down with Silent Sky director, Amanda White, for a quick interview. This was fairly easy being that she’s…ya know…my wife. 😁 ENJOY!

Q: Who are the scientists behind Silent Sky?

Amanda: This play is set in a specific time and place, and it’s about real scientists. We are in 1900 at the top of the play, at the dawn of a new century. Our story begins in the midwest (Wisconsin, as a matter of fact), and ends in Massachusetts, never far from the Harvard Observatory. The women who were the “computers” of the star charts in the play, Henrietta Leavitt, Williamina Fleming, and Annie Jump Cannon, were real science heroes who lived and worked in this time to accomplish astonishing things. Now known as “Leavitt’s Law”, Henrietta's tireless calculations of the Cepheid variable stars pulses (their blinking) cracked open her capacity to map the distance between distant stars, which paved the way for future astronomers to determine their proximity depending on period-luminosity relationship.

Q: Why this particular play, right now?

Amanda: I’m a Community Builder — that’s my life’s work, and if you’re reading this, you no doubt know that theatre-making is a powerful community tool. I believe that stories told publicly and in community are a quality-of-life issue, and that they shape what we think is possible for our families, our neighborhood, our nation, and our world. When we learn about people who live lives we can’t imagine, or see ourselves reflected in a story, we become bigger, more empathic humans. I don’t think there’s a higher pursuit than that.

We are living in an information age, bolstered by so much discovery, and this story lifts that up. This is a play that revels in discovery. Discovery is about risk, delayed gratification, a balance in trusting both intuition and data/facts, and an understanding that the future almost never resembles the past.

The universe is a vast, mysterious place — much like the human mind and heart. This play sits comfortably with the tension and symmetry between those two spaces. Hard science speaks to theatre here; both fields aspire to understand the human condition and how to shine the light forward for its progress. Playwright Lauren Gunderson herself says that science can outshine poetry in its take on the vastness of the universe…I believe this play finds the right balance of both.

Also…who doesn’t love a good love story?

Q: What’s it like to direct “in the round?” How does it work specifically for Silent Sky?

Amanda: Hooboy. How much time do you have?

You could be a lifelong theatregoer, dear reader, and never know that there are lots of different kinds of stages for theatre performance. The John H. Potter Theater, for instance, is a Proscenium Stage. That means that it has that classic frame around the stage, a proscenium arch. Here’s an illustration from the good folks at knowitall.org (!) for reference:

You can see that the audience in a Proscenium theater is all in one spot, out in front of the stage. Theatre “in the round,” then, happens when the audience is positioned around the action — there’s an audience member everywhere the actor turns. This makes it wildly difficult to stage a scene, because no matter where you turn, on stage, someone sees your back! It’s possible, too, that you’re blocking someone or something wherever you’re positioned. WHY would you do this to yourself and to those actors, you might ask? Well, dear reader, because this play takes place mostly in an observatory. I wanted a shape that felt like it was reflective of that space. And because there are some moments in the show that also happen on a ship, I wanted the space to have a nautical feel, too. Our wonderful scenic designer, Jay Ganz, created four canopies that look like either sails or the edges of an Observatory view, depending on the moment, and the design allows the actors to move anywhere on that round stage.

It requires us to think about dimension when we stage — the actors move around more frequently than they might in a Proscenium staging, so they can change the experience for the viewer. And we can create all kinds of complex stage pictures that we couldn’t if the view were flat.

Q: What do you hope audiences will take away with them after seeing Silent Sky?

Amanda: I hope they will feel how tiny and immense they are. This is a play about the vastness of love, and the space it occupies. The story uses a metaphor — all the stars of the universe as the vastness of human capacity for love and passion — to do two big things: lift up a specific scientist and her accomplishments in a specific moment in time, and remind us that we are both miniscule and vast.

Q: Give us an insider look at this rehearsal process.

Amanda: Ok, a few fun things:

• Warren Sampson, who is our brilliant Sound Designer, was inspired by the work of Amy Beach, a composer who was a contemporary of Henrietta Leavitt. Beach was obstructed by society in her work much like Leavitt was, and she was a genius of another kind. Warren meticulously scored the production to line up Beach’s arc with Leavitt’s, to beautiful effect. I love this sound design, and I could listen to the score all day.

• Alyssa Ehlen, who plays “Margaret,” sat down with the music to try to figure out how one might play it on a fake piano. She got her wooden “keys” during tech week, and she is doing a great job finding her way without actual sound from the prop piano.

• Lois Estell, who plays “Williamina,” is our de facto production dramaturg. It turns out that Lois is a real sky nerd, and she brought in article after fact after scientific study to guide our process.

• The cast and creative team was very fortunate to learn some of the basics of these scientists’ work from Dr. Eileen Korenic, Professor Emerita in Physics at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. Dr Korenic (or as the cast has fondly nicknamed her, “Dr. K of the Milky Way”) spent some time with us sharing historical process, and helping us with context and even pronunciations. Audience members who join us for the final matinee performance on Sunday, March 30th can hear Dr. Korenic and me in conversation following the show.

• Tiny spoiler: the images you see in the final moment of the show are courtesy of Lighting Designer Alex Clark, and they are real images taken from the Hubble Telescope.

Q: What’s it like to have the world’s dreamiest husband?

Amanda: I’ll tell you what it’s not: boring.

my favorite gallery piece of the week
The galleries re-open on March 14th. We’re so close, everyone!

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Talk to you next week!