Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Carol Rosegg ©2025  Maria-Christina Oliveras and Jordan Baker

Night Sky” by Susan Yankowitz and put on by Power Productions and The National Aphasia Association at Baruch College is about an astronomer named Anna, a highly intelligent woman who happens to be a teacher, writer and lecturer. She is hit by a car and is diagnosed with aphasia, which impairs a person’s ability to process language, but does not affect intelligence. She is, as it were, locked inside herself, a bit like Dr. Oliver Sacks’ patients in “Awakenings.” Unfortunately, the treatment Anna gets here is of the pedestrian sort, and proves how difficult it is to write a play about a disease where the lead cannot communicate, because as a construct, it is not inherently theatrical.

In the play “Wit” by Margaret Edson, Professor Vivian Bearing, a highly articulate and somewhat difficult university professor, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the play relied not on her treatments and not on her family, as she had none, but solely on what mattered to her: the sonnets of John Donne, her wit, her analysis of the life she had led by drawing a parallel between the way the doctors treated her and her own approach to her students, leading her to change her belief that intellect was more important than compassion. So by the end of “Wit,” the audience, who had come to know this prickly yet all too human woman, genuinely felt for her. Was genuinely moved by her plight. That does not happen in “Night Sky.”

Carol Rosegg ©2025  Jim Stanek and Jordan Baker

We only get a brief glimpse of who Anna is: the play opens and she briefly lectures her unseen students. Then she is home, dealing with a deadline for an article, a neglected male partner, Daniel (Jim Stanek) who does no chores and a demanding daughter Jen (Lauren Ashley Carter) studying for a French test: fairly common stuff. The plotting resembles a movie-of-the-week, as Anna and Daniel have a fight, and Anna runs out into traffic. I have great difficulty believing that Anna, a driven academic, highly literate, and engaged with the world, would be with a second-rate opera singer who has few redeeming qualities to mitigate his minor career (in their fight, she refers to him as “a loser.”) I also didn’t believe the manufactured row, and running out into traffic did not jibe with anything in Anna’s character. She was not an irrational woman.

After that, Anna is in the hospital and speaking gibberish. Her family takes over, as does the Speech therapist (Maria-Christina Oliveras, in a variety of roles). But because we cannot know the Anna trapped inside that mind, there is not much empathy mustered for her. That’s a shame, because she easily has the beginnings of the most fascinating character up there. It’s just that we are not given enough of her.
I last saw Jordan Baker in “Suddenly Last Summer”, and before that, in “Three Tall Women.” She is a magnificent actress: she was then and still is now. She gives her all to the part of Anna, but the writing doesn’t give her the scope to make Anna a fully fleshed-out, fully realized human being. There has to be a way to infer what someone’s mind is going through during a condition like this; after all, this is theatre. One can be as inventive as one likes. “Night Sky” gives the audience what it expects: a gifted woman, an accident, therapy, the difficulty of recovery. What is needed is the unexpected, and that is exactly what “Night Sky” is missing.