Just over a century ago, the universe got bigger.

In the early 1900s, scientists at the Harvard College Observatory perfected a measurement technique to assess the distance of stars and galaxies far beyond our own.

Henrietta Leavitt was one of the often unpaid and always unrecognized women who served as “human computers” at the observatory. Lauren Gunderson’s Silent Sky tells of the patriarchal scientific establishment of the day that forbade women from using tools of discovery such as the telescope, relegating highly educated women to the role of secretarial cataloguers. 

But it was Leavitt’s mathematical calculations that led to the discovery that allowed for perceptions of distance hitherto impossible.

Meanwhile, her work was threatened by more than misogyny. Illness and deafness impinge, and her relationships with friends, family, and colleagues, including her sister Margaret, the conservative yet dashing Peter Shaw, “computer” Williamina Fleming, and suffragette Annie Cannon, center the conflict between the necessities of this world and the drive to go beyond it.

Shatterbox Theatre’s production features local actors who bring this story to life with thoughtful empathy. Robin Snip plays Henrietta Leavitt with a sense of awe about her character, “It’s not really a character arc: Henrietta is just kind of on a straight line up. Harvard asked her to go to the observatory, and it gets her out of her small town, her schoolteacher job. And it gets her doing something that she’s passionate about. She stays late, she works late. She sleeps in the office. She’s so enthralled by the idea of space and has been since a child. She just keeps looking up, even when she becomes sick.”

The common humanity of the characters is a strong counterbalance. Maggie Colby, who plays Leavitt’s more domestically-oriented sister, Margaret, describes one moment. “They ask, how do you celebrate measuring the universe? And Margaret says, ‘I have cookies!’”

“The play just refines these beautiful moments that we can all really relate to,” says Ms. Snip. “It kind of grounds us in such an expansive space. I used to look up, and I still do, in awe. But now, even more so, every time I get home from rehearsal and I look into the sky, and I’m just flabbergasted.”

The themes are universal: the apparent conflict between science and faith, seeking the unknown and then defining it, one’s sense of self-importance and a cosmos that renders entire lifetimes as insignificant.

There are political questions, too. The abstract intellectual pursuit of the stars comes up against allowing women to vote. The rights of women to do the same work that men do, and to get credit for it, are connected through the figure of Annie Jump Canon, both an astronomer and an activist for the right to vote.

The play speaks to all, old and young. Director Georgia Papanicolaou brings it home to her own experience: “we have these women who have been silenced, and their work being claimed by men to further advance men’s careers. When I read it, I was struck. I’d never heard of this history. From my math and science teachers I would never have heard of these women. To have this story, and these women, focused in a theatrical production, and discovering their histories and discovering that they’re silenced is shocking and powerful.

“I love this play, and working with these amazing performers who have stepped into their roles beautifully. The more we do it, the more we discover.”

Silent Sky opens May 28.
For tickets visit silentsky.ca