Review: Groundbreaking astronomer shines bright in outdoor Livermore drama

Women in the sciences have all too often had trouble having their contributions taken seriously by men entrenched in the field.

San Francisco playwright Lauren Gunderson has been doing her part to rectify that, writing a number of plays about groundbreaking female scientists of history such as Ada Lovelace, Émilie du Châtelet and Marie Curie.

Found by American Theatre magazine to be the most produced playwright in America (other than Shakespeare) in several recent seasons, Gunderson writes about a great many other topics as well, but these science plays have made up a significant subset of her work.

Among the best of these plays is “Silent Sky,” which SPARC Theater is now performing outdoors at Livermore’s Darcie Kent Vineyards. This luminous drama explores the life and discoveries of Henrietta Leavitt, the astronomer at the dawn of the 20th century who discovered a way to determine the distance of stars by the relationship between their brightness and their frequency of pulsation, radically expanding scientific understanding of the scale of the universe.

Formerly the Livermore Shakespeare Festival, SPARC’s other production this summer is William Shakespeare’s popular comedy “Much Ado About Nothing,” which opens a few days after “Silent Sky” closes.

Packed with Gunderson’s trademark wit, the play centers on Leavitt’s work at the Harvard College Observatory as one of three women “computers” tasked with cataloging the stars captured in photographic plates from the powerful telescope that they’re never allowed to touch. When she learns her department is jokingly referred to as the “harem,” she’s less than thrilled.

Reprising the role she played in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s Northern California premiere of the play in 2014, Elena Wright portrays Leavitt with palpable zeal and voracious hunger for knowledge. She’s forcefully forthright and especially flustered in social situations, especially of a romantic nature.

Jake Arky is amusingly awkward as Peter Shaw, the apprentice of and stand-in for unseen observatory director Dr. Pickering. Peter both admires Henrietta intensely and embodies the small-minded forces that stand in her way, limiting her to her assigned role and complacently proclaiming that the universe is no larger than the Milky Way galaxy.

As her senior coworkers who make an odd couple in their own right, Mary Ann Rodgers’ Annie Cannon is comically stern and serious and easily flustered, and Emilie Talbot exudes warmth and playful good humor as Williamina Fleming.

Radhika Rao’s prim and fretful Margaret, Henrietta’s sister, embodies the home and family she left behind, writing her cajoling letters that are staged as a conversation in which Henrietta isn’t really listening. There’s a warm bond between the sisters, but Margaret also represents all the restrictions of patriarchal tradition and their religious upbringing as children of a minister. At the same time, she serves as a reminder that Leavitt never does find any kind of what we might call work-life balance. Her work is her life.