Project: 3, Or The Sound Of The Great Existential Nothingness

Production: Breaking String Theatre

Location: Off Center, Austin, TX

Direction: Graham Schmidt

Text: Anton Chekhov/ Timothy Braun

Set: Ia Ensterä

Lighting: Steven Shirey

Costumes: Jamie Urban

Sound: Buzz Moran

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"Ia Enstera, continuing her fertile partnership with Breaking String, designed a set not in the round, but in the triangle. The playing surface is a dark, smooth, wooden triangular platform. It is formed of composite panels and beams of wood, all well polished. A few items of furniture suggest a domestic living room.  Above the set hangs a galaxy of unfrosted light bulbs and a few other instruments, just above head height, all set in their courses by Steven Shirey, the new Austin lighting god. Whether hallucination or optical illusion, the galaxy seems to move and wheel as the lighting sets change, not just when Irina bumps the bulbs partying on the shoulders of The Captain.  The dark of the earth and the light of the sky face each other eternally, and human beings play between. This compelling image is a 21st century updating of the tribal three-level cosmos, found throughout tribal cultures in their ur-myths worldwide and no doubt prehistorically, as well  The mythic articulation is Mother Earth and Father Sky; other personifications are common. Almost universal in this cosmology is the Middle Place, where humans, plants and animals dwell and water flows. This is the universal stage, and Three’s set and lighting design have struck into it in imagistic and symbolic ways. Great credit goes to designers Enstera and Shirey. "

https://ctxlivetheatre.com/reviews/review-three-or-the-sound-of-the-great-existent/