Gunderson’s sparkling dialogue is wonderfully witty, touching and inspiring all at once. Malcolm Rodgers’ cozy two-story set is more elaborate than those for many past SPARC shows, with a large telescope perched above, enticingly untouched. When she learns her department is jokingly referred to as the “harem,” she’s less than thrilled.īay Area arts: 9 amazing live shows to see this weekend and beyondĭirector Jennifer Le Blanc’s staging is as brisk and lively as Leavitt’s restless impatience to move knowledge forward demands. 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. 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.įormerly 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. 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.įound 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.Īmong the best of these plays is “Silent Sky,” which SPARC Theater is now performing outdoors at Livermore’s Darcie Kent Vineyards. Women in the sciences have all too often had trouble having their contributions taken seriously by men entrenched in the field.
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