Galileo

What better way to stage a play about pioneering astronomer Galileo than by starlight?

That’s the setting for this small production by the Yolo County-based summertime company known as the Barnyard Theatre, which presents the play Galileo under the open nighttime sky, next to the old Schmeiser barn—a rural location in the general vicinity of Davis.

The play is by the great radical German playwright Bertolt Brecht—a man who, like Galileo, tended to question authority. Galileo used the telescope (a new invention in the 1600s) to determine that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way around. This determination got him in big trouble with the church. Galileo eventually was forced to recant—sort of.

Brecht’s provocative, leftward-leaning style of theater also got him in trouble, first with the Nazi authorities in the 1930s, and later, in 1947, with the communist-hunters on the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C., who grilled Brecht in a manner resembling Galileo’s questioning centuries before. (Brecht eventually left the United States and settled in East Germany.)

Brecht started working on Galileo in the 1930s while still in Nazi Germany. After arriving in the United States, he reworked the play with actor Charles Laughton, who staged an English-language “American version” in Los Angeles in 1947. Brecht kept working on the play—in German—and premiered a different version in Cologne in 1955.

Barnyard Theatre has been staging shows for four summers, with the motto “think organic” and a desire to create “theater from scratch.” This show features a cast of 16.