YOUNGSTOWN — Judging by the size of the audience Saturday at Hopewell Theatre, a play about astronomy isn’t an easy sell.

But there’s a reason why Lauren Gunderson has been one of the most produced playwrights in the United States for the last decade. Her scripts are entertaining and accessible. “Silent Sky,” which opened Friday for a two-weekend run, is no exception, and Hopewell’s production delivers the magic and sense of wonder necessary to make the somewhat formulaic story work.

“Silent Sky” is based on the true story of Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921), who discovered methods for measuring astronomical distance while working at Harvard Observatory. She wasn’t an astronomer, at least not in the eyes of her employer. She was a “computer,” one of the women who cataloged information from the images taken by Harvard’s refracting telescope (something the women weren’t allowed to touch) and then passed it on to the male astronomers for their research.

The script doesn’t dumb down the science but it does make it accessible, even for someone who nearly flunked Space Physics — commonly referred to on campus as “Physics for poets and basket weavers” — his senior year.

The story is peppered with one-liners in the banter among Henrietta (Casey Murphy) and her fellow computers, Williamina Fleming (Rhonny Dam) and Annie Jump Cannon (Emily Royer), who also made important discoveries in her work. The three actors and director Traci Manning have the comedic rhythms of the dialogue flowing naturally without diminishing the more serious elements, and Murphy strongly conveys Henrietta’s single-minded quest for knowledge.

The frequent target of their withering comments is Peter Shaw (Shawn Lockaton), the only man in the cast and a stand-in for the patriarchy at large. Lockaton is a gifted actor who sells a joke with his entire body, getting a far greater reaction with his stammers and gestures than words in the script would indicate.

McKenna Lago also stands out as Leavitt’s sister, Margaret, who stays behind in Wisconsin and follows a more traditional path as a wife and mother and a loyal daughter to her pastor father while suppressing her own desires to become a composer.

Manning not only makes her directing debut with “Silent Sky,” but she also makes efficient use of Hopewell’s smallish stage with her set design that requires two distinct locations. Her costuming and hair effectively establish the play’s early 20th century time period.

Her greatest asset on the technical side is lighting designer Adam Dominick. There’s a magical second act moment Dominick achieves with the lighting that encapsulates the sense of awe that Henrietta feels when gazing at the stars. Seeing it happen live on stage is so much more impactful than watching a CGI effect on a movie screen, and it’s one more reminder that live theater, even on a community theater level, can deliver experiences that other art forms can’t touch.

The narrative arc and themes of “Silent Sky” are similar to the movie “Hidden Figures,” also based on a true story, the limited series “Lessons in Chemistry,” based on a novel, and other works about women’s struggles in male-dominated fields.

That gives “Silent Sky” a familiarity that doesn’t lead to many surprises, although Gunderson wrote this play before either of the examples above. And more than a century after Henrietta’s death, there are those in power who would dismiss her as a DEI hire, so clearly there’s a need to keep telling these stories, even if the ones who need to hear them likely won’t be buying a ticket.