Beth Terranova has a lot in common with her character in the latest Colonial Players production. In the play “Silent Sky,” she is Williamina Fleming, a Scottish-American astronomer who cataloged thousands of stars and other astronomical phenomena.

While Terranova doesn’t work with stars, the Colonial Players art director and actress seeks to inspire and empower women just as Fleming and the play’s other characters based on real women did in the early 1900s.

Tell me about how Williamina fits into “Silent Sky.”

This is a true story focusing on women who were astronomers in the 1900s. Wilhelmina is a third member of the working trio with Henrietta Leavitt, the main character, and Annie Jump Cannon. They worked in a little, secluded room of the Harvard Observatory. Women weren’t allowed to look through the telescope. It was the bias of the time. They were in the observatory, but they themselves never got to observe.

My character started out as a Scottish immigrant who was originally working as a maid for Dr. Pickering, the head of the observatory. He didn’t like the young men who were interns because he thought they didn’t do the very tedious work it took to compute the measurements of stars. He said “my housekeeper could do a better job,” and she did. At that point on he hired women as the interns. They would literally look at thousands and thousands of these dots to record the information. Williamina, at one point, had been in charge of all the women. But it was because of Henrietta’s work that they accepted the idea we were looking at stars that were hundreds of lightyears away.

They wouldn’t let her do that work, so she did it on her own. We tagline it as “Hidden Figures” for the early 1900s.

What got you excited about this role?

When I was on the committee that selected this play, I knew this was the one show this season I wanted to be a part of onstage. I love the strong women characters in it. I myself was in the (U.S.) Army after I was in ROTC at Johns Hopkins (University). It was very much a man’s world. I love plays that show the strong female protagonist. It sort of reminds me of life.

Growing up learning history in school, you didn’t learn about women. Women did remarkable things and got so little acknowledgment or credit for it. I think that’s what makes it so exciting. Kids should be learning this part of history.

How did you prepare for the role?

The astronomy club at Anne Arundel Community College helped us understand the scientific process women went through. They meet about once a month or so, and they did a lecture focusing on Henrietta Leavitt. Emily Comstock, who plays Henrietta, and I were able to attend that lecture a couple weeks ago. It was about her, but also about the science of cataloging and measuring stars. A couple of days later they came to our rehearsal to answer questions we had about the text of the play. The women in the play, we say a lot of things, but it would be really really helpful to understand what we’re saying.

There’s also a book called “The Glass Universe” by Dava Sobel, who basically chronicled the women who worked at the Harvard Observatory. I’ve been going through it to find out more about my character. I think pretty much all of us have or read it cover to cover or at least gotten a copy. It helped me understand things a little more specific to my character. There are photographs of what the workstations looked like and what they actually used. It’s helpful to have some good historical background.

As the art director, what do you find special about Colonial Players?

There are some unique challenges at Colonial Theater. The biggest one, but one we’re very used to by now, is that most of the plays we put on are not meant for theater in the round. So when we choose a play, we have to ask ourselves “Is it something we can do justice to in a round setting?” The biggest challenge is figuring out how we take a show written for a traditional stage and produce it in a way that will give our audience the best experience.

One more challenge for colonial players is, the closest audience members are literally a few feet from the stage. One of the challenges our theater does so well is getting historically authentic costumes. We can’t get away with anything on our stage. When we’re doing historic plays, we have to be very very accurate with props. What do astronomical instruments look like in 1905? It’s that kind of research. Even to that person sitting in the first row, what you are doing looks accurate and correct.

ssanfelice@capgaznews.com