A SAMUEL FRENCH, INC. TITLE
Friday, August 16, 2024, at 7:30 PM
Saturday, August 17, 2024, at 7:30 PM
Full-Length Play, Drama
Night Sky theatrically explores what Steven Hawking has called the two mysteries remaining to us: the brain and the cosmos. When she is hit by a car, the brilliant and articulate astronomer Anna loses her ability to speak, a condition known as aphasia. What emerges from her mouth is a hodge-podge of unconnected words alternately confusing, funny, original and wise – and sometimes all four. In a series of brief, often comic episodes, the play follows Anna through her illness and ultimate acceptance of herself – a personal triumph, despite a continuing infirmity – and dramatizes the impact of her changed circumstances on her lover, her teenage daughter and her professional life.
Everyone will be touched by the themes this play considers – language, inner and outer space, the challenges of a devastating affliction, the consolations and ordeals of family life and, most of all, the universal hunger and need for communication.
“Susan Yankowitz’s Night Sky is a rare thing: a play with a mind. It is also about the mind as universe, where language is internal astronomy. It shows us that more than hearts can be broken.” – Variety
“The enthralling Night Sky, running off-Broadway in Manhattan, may be the accomplished Susan Yankowitz’s best play yet. Her first-hand knowledge of aphasia and exemplary research into astronomy are breathtaking as she embraces an insight of Stephen Hawking’s that the two abiding unsolved mysteries are the brain and the cosmos. She makes a poetic and dramatic case for the resemblance or correspondence between the black holes of the universe and the dark recesses of the human brain, and unponderously enlightens us in her serious and humorous, wise and profoudly moving play.” – John Simon, Bloomberg News
“The most daring aspect of Night Sky is its willingness to contemplate the absence of speech as a benefit rather than a disability, the source of a renewed sense of wonder in minutiae, of personal achievement in every complete sentence, and of revelation in every verbal slip... The last word, the summing-up of Anna’s attempt to deliver her paper, conveys both her inability and her scientist’s sense of wonder at the universe – ‘speechless.’” – Michael Feingold, Village Voice
“Bursting with wit, intelligence and energy, Night Sky is a sharp, multi-layered exploration of the cosmos and human beings’ place in it, using all the resources of theatre to address the limits of our understanding of physical and metaphysical universes. It’s an illuminating work, not least in its exploration of gender issues while bringing a human dimension to the other-worldly speculations of science.” – Peter Cudmore, The Scotsman