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Over the years, I’ve come to expect Skidmore College’s theater productions to be challenging, if not downright baffling. And the plays of mid-20th century German writer Bertolt Brecht are not particularly easy to embrace, being full of unsympathetic characters and distracting theatricality meant to keep the audience at bay. The Life of Galileo, then, is surprising: It’s about as straightforward a play as I have ever seen at Skidmore, and its central character as compelling a hero as I have ever rooted for on its stage.

As director Carolyn Anderson explains in her program notes, Brecht used the story of the 17th-century astronomer and inventor Galileo Galilei much as Arthur Miller used colonial-era witchhunts in The Crucible, as a way to comment on present-day politics during tenuous times. Brecht’s first version was penned in 1938, while Hitler was massing his army; after Hiroshima, he revised it to bring in questions of how science can be used for good or ill.

Anderson’s production also brings to the forefront the debate over who is worthy to engage in scientific debate (definitely the people, for whom Galileo made sure to write in the vernacular, not in Latin; but not Galileo’s daughter, Virginia, though whether this feminist sidenote comes from Brecht, the 1980 translation by Howard Brenton, or Anderson’s own interpretation I’m not sure).

The Life of Galileo opens in Padua in 1609, when Italy and all of Europe is divided into competing republics, which are to greater or lesser degrees under the sway of the Pope and the Inquisition (who themselves seem sometimes to be in competition). Every day there’s a new scientific discovery, and the “answers in the old books”—including the Scriptures—“won’t do anymore.” Looking for a way to finance his research other than by taking on private students, whom he must tutor in the officially recognized Earth-centered cosmology, Galileo borrows the idea of the telescope, just invented in Holland, and passes it off to university leaders and the city’s businessmen as his own.

But having sold his moneymaking “invention” (its uses include spying on enemies from afar), he soon finds that the telescope also provides the enhanced celestial observations he’s needed to prove that Copernicus’s sun-centered system, with the Earth just one small part, is true. He leaves the more freethinking Venice republic for Florence, seeking the patronage of the Medicis (for whom he names the moons of Jupiter “the Medici stars”). But in Florence, the Inquisition also has a stronger toehold, putting Galileo’s life at risk.

As Galileo, Ilan Bachrach, with his overgrown beard and slight paunch, makes a convincing middle-age sensualist (we are told that Galileo enjoys his food). But it is not just physically that Bach rach fulfills the part: Throughout the show, he’s convincingly passionate about his discoveries, his mission to share science with the masses, and his belief that truth will prevail, even over religious doctrine. His performance makes the play come alive.

If the rest of the cast bring somewhat less depth to their roles than Bachrach, they do make their characters (as many as seven different ones for some of the actors) and Brecht/Brenton’s words completely understandable, so that the audience has no trouble following the issues involved. Especially notable are Michael Baldwin as Andrea Sarti, the young son of Galileo’s maid, who wrestles the 9-year-old Grand Duke of Florence over a model of the universe, and the lovely Valerie Issembert as Galileo’s devout daughter, whose commitment to her father’s goals hasn’t been nurtured as Andrea’s has. Also notable were Michael Read, who brings real anguish to his part as the philosopher Sagredo, wondering where God is in Galileo’s universe, and Scott Sweatt, the fellow scientist who becomes the next Pope.

Scenic designer Garett E. Wilson has transformed the black-box theater into a planetarium, complete with a ceiling of stars. Patty Pawliczak’s costumes are period without being flashy. Skidmore alumni Ronald Binion’s super-sized puppets and masks are impressive, and Carl Landa’s electronic “soundscapes” of swishing comets and subtle music add texture to the piece. Seeing The Life of Galileo is like peering into a telescope: It makes you think, not because it’s beyond comprehension, but because it brings so much into focus.

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