Kristin Slaney
On Monday, February 24, this year’s EST/Sloan First Light Festival will present the first public reading/performance of Act One of MISS MITCHELL, a new musical by Kristin Slaney and members of The Lobbyists. The show celebrates the life and achievements of Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), the first female professional astronomer in America and a pioneer in the education of women. To learn more, we snagged playwright Slaney and two of her actor-musician-composer collaborators, Alex Grubbs and Tommy Crawford, and peppered them with questions:
This event is sold out!
(Interview by Rich Kelley)
How and when did you first learn about Maria Mitchell? When did you know you wanted to write about her?
Alex Grubbs of The Lobbyists
Alex: In 2015, we performed a musical, SeaWife*, at the South Street Seaport. It was an epic tale about whaling in mid-nineteenth-century, set on the island of Nantucket. In 2017, the White Heron Theatre on Nantucket invited us to perform it there and we were pretty jazzed about that. While we were there, we noticed how prominently the name and figure of Maria Mitchell appears on the island. The Maria Mitchell Association, an organization dedicated to preserving Maria's legacy, operates out of the house she was born in. The Nantucket Atheneum, the library where she worked for many years, still has a bust of her. Her observatory is right across the street from where she's now buried. There's a knowledge of her and what she accomplished that's kind of woven into the history of Nantucket as an island. She embodies the Nantucket “can-do” attitude.
We had known Kristin around the Youngblood and EST world, and have been a fan of her writing. When we were thinking about what would work for this story, her style came to mind.
Kristin: Yes, it was through the EST/Youngblood Playwriting Program that I got to meet Alex, Tommy, and the other Lobbyists. Tommy was in a brunch play of mine, Alex was in one of my Bloodworks shows, and so they had an idea of my sensibilities as a writer when they approached me about the Maria Mitchell project.
Maria Mitchell, US astronomer and pioneer of women's rights, from a portrait by H. Dassell, 1851, 4 years after she had discovered Miss Mitchell’s Comet at age 29.
I became interested in Maria pretty quickly. Most famously, she discovered a comet in 1847; she was the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she was hired as a computer for the Nautical Almanac, tracking the tables for Venus; and when Vassar College opened, she was the first woman professor to be hired, as an astronomy professor (despite the fact that she never went to college herself). She was also notoriously private. She burnt her journals in 1846. She didn't want all the attention associated with discovering the comet, and her sister Phebe (who ends up playing a huge role in our piece) redacted her journals after her death.
What kind of research did you do to develop the book?
Kristin: We've done a lot of research. There are a few different Maria Mitchell books (especially her compiled journals and letters) that have been important to the research process, but there are so many gaps in what we understand about her life, because of how many of her documents were redacted or destroyed. What we do have showcases this intense sense of drive to do the work she was meant to do, which I really connected with. Nantucket was a place very different from much of America at the time, especially for women. Whaling sent many men off to sea, leaving women to run things—there was a street of women-owned businesses called Petticoat Row. The island was largely Quaker (a religion Maria and her family members were born into but later left), and Quakerism held that women should also be allowed to be ministers. Quaker parents gave the same education to their daughters as to their sons, which was uncommon at that time. Maria's father William ran a school and was also an astronomer. While growing up, Maria often assisted him. Moreover, Nantucket is an island, so there's this sense of isolationism that fostered certain attitudes while keeping out more Puritanical ones. All this was context for how Maria was able to become an astronomer, and it's inextricably tied to the island as a place.
Why this play? Why now? Why a musical?
Tommy Crawford of The Lobbyists
Tommy: We are drawn to Maria's independence of thought, her humility, her creative spirit, and the rigor with which she pursued her studies. Her story as an educator and thinker should be known and carries a lot of resonance to our world today, and I think can be inspiring to many people in different walks of life. We are drawn to the way she explored big questions of life through her daily work.
Alex: One of the things we are interested in exploring in this workshop is how music will relate to the world we are building—what will it sound like? Interestingly enough, Maria grew up Quaker, and they didn’t allow music at all! However, there were definitely ways that the music of the world and perhaps the celestial “music of the spheres” gave a soundtrack to her world.
What has been your working process for developing the songs for this show? Which comes first: words or music?
Kristin: Our working process has been guided in a few different ways. There are certain songs and tunes Tommy and Alex came up with early in the process that definitely informed the overall piece before there was any script at all. There are certain song moments that Tommy and Alex pulled from the initial outline I made. Now that I’ve finished Act One of the book, we've been locating different moments that want to be musical. There's one tune Tommy and Alex came up with last spring, before we had any idea what the show would be, that's been stuck in my head throughout the process and I think has informed it, tonally. So the songs are informed by the story, but there's also been a back-and-forth in the process.
The Lobbyists. From left, Tommy Crawford. Eloise Eonnet, Alex Grubbs, Tony Aidan Vo,, Will Turner, Douglas Waterbury-Tieman
How does being actor/musicians factor in the collaborative process?
Alex: It factors heavily in our case. Our collective, The Lobbyists, is really concerned with a new form of musical—this hybrid of concert and play that a lot of theater people are exploring. In that way, we are really drawn to the idea of seeing that theatrical genesis on stage, having actors play the music both heightens the style and also allows the audience to relate in a new way.
How close is your Maria Mitchell to the historical figure? How is she different? Did you take any liberties in creating her?
Kristin: A lot of what we're working with in the show comes very much from Maria Mitchell and who she was, sometimes coming directly from her own writing, but it's also really necessary to diverge from that in making a play. A question that kept coming up before we started was: how can we make a musical about someone who was so private that she burned her documents and seemed embarrassed by any of the attention she got for her discoveries? The answer, so far, has been to deal with this question by making the musical about that. A framing device we're working with right now is Maria's sister Phebe (the one who redacted the documents after Maria's death), going through her sister's papers and trying to decide what to keep and what to lose, trying to guess what this person who was so close to her would want.
Maria Mitchell (second from left) and her students measure the Sun’s rotation from the movement of sunspots. Credit: ID 08.09.05, Archives & Special Coll., Vassar College Library
Have you been to Nantucket? How did visiting there inform the writing of the play or its music?
Kristin: The Lobbyists were there for their production in 2017 but I had never been. Last spring we spent a few days on the island, learning a ton of Maria history and Nantucket history in general. Having the time to spend on Nantucket and to learn about her life there has made all the difference. The town and how it functions is very tied to what's going on in the play, right now.
Alex: It’s an island. People ride bikes everywhere, the beaches are lovely—it’s an easy place to fall in love with. One particular place on the island we were taken with was Madaket beach— on the western end of the island. The road just turns into sand. It feels more remote than other parts of the island. We would ride out with a grill, our instruments and grill oysters on the beach and watch the sunset. It’s both highly developed in parts but also wild and that wildness is protected fiercely. There’s also some kind of salt and magic in the air that preserves things so well. It has one of the largest concentrations of 18th- and 19th-century homes in America. It really feels like stepping back in time. That immersive quality allows the mind to wander freely and consider the history of the fascinating people who lived there. It was a remarkably progressive place, pushing boundaries in education and liberty way before the rest of the country. Women ran many of the businesses while their husbands were away at sea. To this day, more women own businesses than men on the island.
Have you written or collaborated on other plays about science or technology?
Kristin: I was in Youngblood's Sloan Science Brunch two years in a row, which was a really great experience. It kind of gave me the context for how Sloan plays can work—that they are about science, absolutely, but that science is distilled through the story and conflict in the piece.
Kristin, you are an alum of Youngblood. How has being a member of that playwriting group influenced your writing?
Kristin: I am a Youngblood alum, and honestly, that playwriting group has meant so much to me, as a writer. It's a group filled with the most incredible minds, who give the best notes. It was so inspiring to be able to show up once a week and experience the work of my peers, who kept me going as a writer during years when things felt pretty bleak, writing-wise
What’s next for Kristin Slaney? For The Lobbyists?
Kristin: What's next for me? Writing Act Two of MISS MITCHELL, I'm working on a few film projects, and there will be a production of my play Hockey Messiah this fall in Canada.
Tommy: We are working on a few different projects, including a musical called The Golden Spike, and a new music-theater piece called The Westside Cowboys of Death Avenue. We'll be workshopping both later in 2020, and just came off of a workshop of The Golden Spike at BRIClab, as well as a production of Twelfth Night at Two River Theater in New Jersey, for which we wrote the score and in which a number of us performed. We also have a short-form podcast series in the works!
The 2020 EST/Sloan First Light Festival runs from January 16 through March 12 and features readings and workshop productions of ten new plays. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, now in its twenty-second year.
*Editor’s note: SeaWife was nominated for the 2016 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Musical
