After talking with the “Silent Sky” producers and actors, I realized the multitude of different skills and professions involved in producing a play. This elaborate process requires the skills of carpenters, electricians, sound engineers, costume designers, and makeup artists, along with several managers, the production staff, and the actors/actresses, or course. I acted in several plays throughout elementary and middle school, and helped design some of the sets and costumes too. These childhood experiences gave me a good idea of the different skills involved in a production, however producing a play at the professional level takes even more interdisciplinary cooperation and collaboration!

Speaking with some of the individuals involved in the production of “Silent Sky” really allowed me to see the many intersections of art and science in the context of theatre production. After talking with these production staff, I think about the artistry of set design (and designing in general) as an extremely involved process. The planning component of the process is particularly important – after being shown the blueprints for the “Silent Sky” set design, I was inspired to create a precise blueprint for my own project. This precise planning phase in my process didn’t originally seem important (I didn’t think I would need a blueprint), but it ended up being crucial to my process. I used my blueprint to create actual-size paper templates, which in turn, I used to measure and cut the pieces of glass mirror I needed.

The performance of “Silent Sky” gave me a very intriguing perspective on scientific discovery. Scientific discoveries usually seem monumental until new discoveries disprove the previous ones. When a discovery is made, this new information serves as the basis for common knowledge on a given subject. Until this knowledge is disproven, it represents the perfect truth to society. When it is disproven, the entirety of its truth is overturned. Knowledge is constantly evolving, and new knowledge has the raw power to derail entire belief systems and bodies of information. Both science and art rely on curiosity and this drive to explore new information. In this way, art and science are really not as disparate as society portrays them to be – the common curiosity and goal to seek new understanding is a clearly uniting factor in both disciplines.

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“Silent Sky” is based on the true story of Henrietta Leavitt, an under-recognized, yet very inspirational Astronomer who discovered the period-luminosity relationship in Cepheid stars in the small Magellanic Cloud. Leavitt was curious about stars, the Milky Way galaxy, and the universe’s size from a young age. In her twenties, she was offered a computing job at Harvard University. She accepted the job, but was disappointed when she arrived at the Harvard Observatory, and was told she was not allowed to use the telescope because she was a woman. Furious about these sexist restrictions, yet still incredibly passionate about astronomy, she spent years of her life computing and recording data from glass star plates (women who did this job were actually called “computers”). After some time working at the observatory, Henrietta and Peter Shaw (the graduate student of Prof. Edward Charles Pickering) fall in love.

In the midst of new love, and on the brink of astronomical discovery, Henrietta’s father suffers a stroke, and she is forced to go back to her home in Wisconsin to support her family. Her father’s health declines over the following year, and he eventually passes away. When Henrietta finally returns back to Harvard, she is falls ill, and finds out that her love, Peter Shaw, has married another woman. Despite all odds, she hastily gets right back to work. Struggling through grave illness over the next year or so, she continues to analyze the stars, and eventually makes a remarkable discovery! She discovered that a longer period between the blinking of stars meant a further distance from those stars. Her accomplishment led to many other significant discoveries by male scientists (including Edwin Hubble), but she was not given credit for her work until shortly before her death. After she passed at age 53, her discovery was recognized as Nobel Prize-worthy.

This production was humorous, romantic, and fiery – I really enjoyed the incorporation of astronomy, romance, and humor into a single production that effectively shows the significance of Henrietta Leavitt’s life work. Despite the oppression of occupational sexism, Leavitt was able to make a monumental discovery that built the foundation for later cosmological discoveries. Her work is inspiring to say the least, and her findings led to the understanding that the Milky Way galaxy is just one of millions of galaxies in the universe.