Finding a place in the cosmos

 

The cast and creative team gathered last month for the first rehearsal of “Galileo’s Daughter,” a co-production of WAM Theatre of Lenox and Central Square Theater of Cambridge, Mass. Michael Nancollas photo, courtesy of WAM Theatre

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

LENOX, Mass.

When she was 9, her father took a telescope into the garden and showed her mountains on the moon. No one else had ever seen them with this kind of clarity.

She was Virginia Galilei then, though she became Sister Maria Celeste — Galileo’s eldest daughter, who stood with him through his trial, fought for him, and sent him herbal medicines in his illness while she taught her sisters the names of stars.

Her story emerges in “Galileo’s Daughter,” as Dava Sobel, internationally known for her writing on women in the sciences, translates her letters and explores her life. Sobel’s book has now inspired a play of the same name, and award-winning playwright Jessica Dickey shares her work with WAM Theatre in a co-production with Central Square Theater of Cambridge that opens Oct. 18 at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox.

The story revolves around a woman looking for creative freedom, passion and love returned -- and around a daughter’s close interaction with her father. It’s a story of mutual care, respect and curiosity that director Reena Dutt finds powerful.

“My father raised me without gender roles,” Dutt said, “and it is beautiful to see a play with that. Marie Celeste can do anything a man can do, and the freedom her father gives her is gorgeous.”
Diego Arciniegas, a Colombian-American actor, director and teacher based in Boston, will perform as Galileo, and Sandra Seoane-Seri will return to WAM Theatre and Central Square Theater as Maria Celeste. And Caroline Kinsolving, an actor in Los Angeles, New York and the Berkshires, will play the role of a contemporary writer who travels to Florence to research Maria Celeste’s letters to her father.

The writer (she is never given a name in the play) comes to Italy at a time of transition in her own life, and she is standing at a precipice.

“The sky is heavy with clouds,” she says in the play. “I see a small lane of stone that veers steeply upward, and I take it, the hill so steep I lean forward — my chest parallel to the ground, heart pounding. The air is different. I can see for miles. My entire life is ahead of me. My entire life …”

She is just beginning to listen to her own instincts, Kinsolving said. And as someone who has been in and out of relationships, Kinsolving said she finds that listening deeply important and heartbreakingly hard.

“I love that her arc, her journey, her heartbreak is subtle compared to many stories we’re told, and deeply important,” she said. “At the beginning of the play, she is very fragile.”

Dutt said the writer comes to Maria Celeste’s story as a quest, holding onto her admiration for a woman who has passion and agency, and does not question who she is outside of anyone else.

 

Studying the heavens
Virginia Galilei was born in 1600, in a network of city-states conflicted between science and faith, exploration and censorship, plague and quarantine.

She came to Firenze with her father and his telescope when she was 10, less than five years after Johannes Kepler, reading the work of the Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haythan and his “Book of Optics,” understood enough of the eye to begin to show the workings of the retina.

Galileo angled light through lenses and brought the skies closer. He saw “‘the mother of loves,’ as he called the planet Venus, cycling through phases from full to crescent,” Sobel writes. He evolved new proof that the earth moved in space and orbited the sun. And he entered a conflict with the Roman Catholic Church that could re-imagine a central tenet of faith — or cost him his life.

And yet this is not centrally his story, Kinsolving said. The tension that threatened him plays out in the eyes of a woman in a cloister and a woman seeking her own intellectual freedom.

Dutt finds their relationships compelling, as they come to life on stage and entangle across time and space. Working with Kinsolving as the writer is a joy, she said, and her role is challenging. As someone recently and joyfully married herself, Kinsolving is playing a woman on the edge of divorce.

As family, Arciniegas and Seoane-Seri have evolved their own playful language, Dutt said, a sense of kinship and warm pleasure in intelligence. In risk and debate, they express love for each other and a shared passion for knowledge, looking through a telescope to see the moons of Jupiter. And for Dutt, they call up memories.

“When I travel, I have a picture of my dad with me,” she said. “He was my best friend, and he passed in 2015. The relationship here is so similar.”
Her father loved encouraging people he taught and mentored, she said, and he did not believe in oppressing anyone by withholding education. His heart was in making sure everyone was informed.

“He did not treat me differently,” she said. “He didn’t want me to believe in gender bias.”
The play condenses time, she said. Virginia is 10 years old when her father tells her she will have to enter a convent — and 13 when she and her younger sister walk through the gate. Because of what he is going to undergo, Dutt said, she believes that he thought his daughters would be best protected there if anything happened to him.

Maria Celeste was 33 when he was put under house arrest.

 

Faith and science
If Galileo taught his daughter to look through a compound microscope and to find moths beautiful, he shared with her a view of the world beyond most people’s scope in her time and place. Dutt finds their interaction honest and vulnerable alongside the political repression of the church.

“And it’s incredibly relevant now,” she said, “as we start re-evaluating what gender roles are, gender bravery, unconscious bias in the sciences.”

She recalls coming with the cast to a planetarium, in their research for the play, where the astronomers took them back in time and showed them the stars as Maria Celeste would have seen them in Firenze. Seoane-Seri was asking questions, imagining Maria Celeste asking her own — how sunlight reflects off of planets, how stars give off light, talking with her father as they transformed their understanding of the sky together.

“I can only imagine how she thought,” Dutt said.
Maria Celeste would see the sky as God’s creation, she said, and anything she saw, she would believe as God’s truth and revelation, shown her for a reason.

“She ends up with an immense faith in God and in science,” Dutt said. “I don’t know that either she or her father believe” that faith and astronomy “are mutually exclusive.”

And even with all its limitations, Dutt said sees the convent as a generous choice. Galileo had never married Virginia’s mother, and an illegitimate woman would find it hard to marry. But he raised both his daughters, and he wanted their mother to have a good and full life, Dutt said. He helped her to marry another man.

“We know about people staying in a relationship for the wrong reasons,” she said. “It’s all too common, when one parent takes care of the emotional labor of the family. And that’s such an unfair way to live at the end of the day. I think it’s brave of him to help her to have a life outside of him. I wish I could talk to him, to ask him what made him take that responsibility.”

She and Kinsolving see questions of responsibility and integrity looping through the contemporary storyline. As someone who has built her life around her marriage, Dutt said, the writer is coming face to face with part of her identity, part of her heart and soul she hasn’t tapped into for years.

“I love an honest story about a woman,” Kinsolving said. “And there are so few. I love it when I read a script where her story is complex and the answer is not simple.”

The writer is struggling with a relationship that may be coming to an end, she said, not because of overt physical violence, but from a lack of depth and understanding. She sees her character running into a wall in her interactions with her former partner, saying, “I just can’t keep doing this.”

When the writer tries to put her struggle into words, Kinsolving said, when she talks about what she wants, why she feels dry and empty, her former partner accuses her of having an affair — the kind of knee-jerk response that says “you’re the problem,” when in fact she is doing the work of relationship and he is refusing to do it.

“In my experience,” she said, “in breakups we’re searching for someone to tell us it will be all right … when our world is ripped out from under us. It’s meaningful that she has come to Italy to research these letters.”

She understands how the writer is drawn to Virginia, to her strength and active zeal and caring. People know Galileo’s struggle; they don’t know how much he shared.

“No one knows his daughter did most of the work,” Kinsolving said, “and she tried to save his life.”

Kinsolving and Dutt have read Maria Celeste’s letters in Sobel’s translations, following her years in the convent, teaching astronomy, learning herbalism and medicine, telling jokes against herself, praying for her father and her closest friend, Sister Luisa.

“The more clearly I perceive the greatness of that love you both bear me,” she wrote, “the more bountiful it grows for being mutually exchanged between the very two persons I love and revere above everyone and everything in this life.”

Maria Celeste and her father would stay in touch all her life. And she invokes the skies in one of the last letters she wrote him, on Nov. 5, 1633, a few months before she died. He was newly condemned by the Roman Inquisition, silenced and sentenced to house arrest. He lost her when she was 34.

“Were you able to fathom my soul and its longing the way you penetrate the Heavens,” she tells him, “… I feel certain you would not complain of me, as you did in your last letter; because you would see and assure yourself how much I should like, if only it were possible, to receive your letters every day and also to send you one every day, esteeming this the greatest satisfaction that I could give to and take from you, until it pleases God that we may once again delight in each other’s presence.”