| . | 06/10/2009
Night Sky
By: Victor Gluck
Cast of Susan Yankowitz’s Night Sky
(Photo credit: Carol Rosegg)
Anna seems to have it all: a career as a famous astronomer and college professor with invitations to international conferences, a younger live-in lover Daniel, and a bright teenage daughter Jennifer. Then Anna is hit by a car and loses her ability to speak conventionally, a condition known as “aphasia.”
Physicist Stephen Hawking has said that the two remaining mysteries are the brain and the cosmos. Susan Yankowitz’s Night Sky, first seen in New York in 1991 and currently being revived, combines both in a study of how Anna’s condition affects her lover, her daughter and her professional life. Astronomy becomes the metaphor for understanding what the loss of language is like for the aphasic who loses the ability to process language in a condition which does not affect intelligence. It is as though one is “lost in the stars” as Anna describes the feeling five months into her therapy.
When the play begins, Anna is lecturing to her class about the cosmos, and says “what we see represents only ten percent - possibly only one percent - of what exists.” This is a good description of what Anna’s ability to speak will be like after her accident. At various times, Bill, her colleague who takes over her classes, compares her condition to that of a solar eclipse and later to a black hole from which no light can escape. At the end of the play, Anna herself explains that the space between stars is now for her like the space between words, but like the night sky, it is both wonderful and mysterious.
The play also uses other metaphors for communication. Daniel, an opera singer, reaches Anna through music. In fact, as language acquisition is on the left side of the brain, and music acquisition is on the right side of the brain, aphasics can sing songs they recall without any trouble. For Jennifer, Anna’s high school aged daughter, studying French becomes yet another metaphor for the inability to process language as she stumbles through her homework and declensions for her exams, but can’t get any help from her family.
Under the direction of Daniella Topol, Jordan Baker is extremely moving as a woman trying to recapture and put into words the thoughts that once were no trouble for her to express, particularly with the specialized vocabulary she needs as an astronomer. Baker is on stage almost continually throughout the play and must travel from speaking nonsense words to making herself understood once again through language. Dan Domingues is also impressive as an aphasic patient further long than Anna when we first meet him.
Unlike Arthur Kopit’s Wings which also deals with a woman coping with aphasia, Night Sky deals with the family and Anna’s attempt to cope when she returns home. The play’s weakness is in its generic opening scene of Anna’s home life and the underwritten characters of her lover and daughter. The play turns quite fascinating as it recounts Anna’s therapy and attempt at recovering her former life and her career. It quite poignantly explores Anna’s frustration with her mistakes in language and inability to make her thoughts known to others. Her goal becomes presenting her paper at the scientific conference in Paris before other astronomers.
Jim Stanek as Anna’s opera singer lover and Lauren Ashley Carter as her 16 year old daughter can’t do much with their stereotyped underwritten roles although they are better in the second half of the play when their characters’ emotions get the better of them. More effective are Tuck Milligan as her teaching colleague Bill and Maria-Christina Oliveras as her speech therapist. Cameron Anderson’s setting contains a magnificent backdrop of the night sky which is hidden through most of the play by panels that back Anna’s living room, classroom and speech therapy room. Peter West’s lighting plot does not go in for any special effects until the final moment of the play. Katherine Roth’s contemporary costumes are suitable without drawing attention to themselves.
In Night Sky, Susan Yankowitz has tackled difficult subject matter and explored a great deal of research. The play was inspired by the late director Joseph Chaikin’s own bout with aphasia. He commissioned the play in response to his own personal struggles to regain language and later directed the play’s first production. Jordan Baker, last seen in New York in Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Three Tall Women, gives a fine performance as the astronomer struggling to explain the cosmos as she fights to regain language. Night Sky’s use of science as a metaphor makes the heroine’s journey a lucid one for the audience.
Night Sky (through June 20)
Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Ave. at 25th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-352-3101 or http://www.theatermania.com
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