The sky’s the limit for ICT Rep and Exploration Place collaboration

Wichita Repertory Theatre is shooting for the stars with its newest drama, “Silent Sky.”

The 2012 drama, the story of groundbreaking 19th-century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and her female colleagues, is being staged at Exploration Place’s dome theater.

“Without a brick-and-mortar building, then we’re always looking for really exciting partnerships, and Stan had this idea that we could talk to Exploration Place,” said Julie Longhofer, artistic director and co-producer with her husband, Stan. “And me being me, I said, oh, they won’t be interested, but they were.”

Adam Smith, president and CEO of Exploration Place, quickly agreed with the concept.

“My first instinct on something like this is just sort of an enthusiastic yes,” said Smith, who has led the facility for the past six years. “I do want Exploration Place to be a good partner in this community, not just with ICT Rep, but with any arts and culture organization. I think as a community, we’re stronger when we can collaborate together, and sometimes, cross-pollination of missions can create some really interesting things.”

Although the dome theater is not designed to incorporate live theater, platforms are creating a stage, Longhofer said, that is just the size of her living room rug.

“It’s a small play with a small footprint that has this big imagination,” she said. “Because of that small footprint, you can put it on a tiny little stage at the front of this planetarium space and then the screen itself in the dome is going to be filled with video projections.”

The projections are created by Jordan Slusher, who also designs for Music Theatre Wichita.

“It is just beautiful,” Longhofer said.

Henrietta Leavitt, the focus of “Silent Sky,” is being played by Jill Herbert.

“She is someone who is very inspiring to me,” Herbert said. “In the early 1900s, before women could even vote, she was a trailblazer, really. She cared so much about the stars and finding the truth in them. She didn’t really care what other people thought, and she was going to make her own way, no matter what obstacles were in her way, she would, quoting one of my lines, ‘push through it, she would charge through it.’

“The answer was in there, and she found it, and she’s just this remarkable woman,” Herbert added.

Longhofer said she had considered the more-traditional theater setting in Exploration Place, but later decided the sky was the limit.

“What this play needs, and what I don’t know if anyone else has ever done it exactly like this, is to have that planetarium space,” said Longhofer, who has not found another theater company that has staged the astronomical-themed drama in a planetarium.

The dome at Exploration Place is 25 years old, and Smith compares it to a small-scale version of The Sphere, the newest showplace in Las Vegas.

“From a technical perspective, from a dimensional perspective, the dome at Exploration Place is the same thing. It’s just they’ve got 14,000 seats and I’ve got 200,” he said. “This was designed from the beginning as sort of like an immersive space where an audience can sit together, and no one’s wearing goggles, but you’re sort of having this immersive experience where the field of view is bigger than your eyes can take in, so you’ve got your peripheral vision is very important part of the whole experience.

“It’s actually exciting for Exploration Place, because we opened the dome in the year 2000 at almost optimally the worst time in history to open something like that, because the timing wasn’t great,” Smith continued. “We live in a world now where everybody’s got infinite content on their TV at home, but nobody’s got a dome. Nobody’s got a place where you can sit with your friends and family and have a shared community experience but somehow be immersed in the content. And that’s actually been really good news for Exploration Place, and there’s lots of exciting things that I think are going to come over the next few years.”

Smith has not seen “Silent Sky,” but was already a fan of Henrietta Leavitt.

“Henrietta is criminally under-recognized in terms of her impact on the history of science,” he said. “She really changed the world and changed the very nature of astronomy. I think most people have heard of Edwin Hubble, but there is no Edwin Hubble if Henrietta Leavitt, who very few people outside of the astronomy insiders have heard of, without the work that she did. I mean, it was impossible. In fact, I’d probably put her achievement as higher.”

Longhofer said the story is as interesting as its backdrop.

“It’s a gorgeous play,” she said. “This one has . . . a real lyrical quality. It’s a historical story, and it’s about science, but it has these elements of music and poetic language. If you really enlarge it, so you have the small story of the human and the family elements, but then you also have these larger, kind of cosmic things that enlarge the story to give it a sense of gravity and, really profoundness, I think.”

‘SILENT SKY’ BY WICHITA REPERTORY THEATRE

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22-Saturday, Jan. 24; 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 25

Where: Exploration Place dome theater, 300 N. McLean Blvd.

Tickets: $35, with discounts for seniors and veterans, from the Exploration Place (https://exploration.org/event/silent-sky/) or ICT Rep (https://ictrep.org/silentsky2026) websites