REVIEW: Dorset Theatre Festival’s Satellites is a Cosmically Beautiful Play
Through 08/16 @ Dorset Theatre Festival, Dorset VT
Photos by T. Charles Erikson
“…a hypnotically spare and beautiful production.”
“Satellites are objects that move around other objects. The moon is a satellite. You are a satellite.”
I’m paraphrasing a line that was used a couple of times in the cosmically beautiful Satellites playing through 8/16 at Dorset Theatre Festival starring TV stars and real life couple Christopher Lowell (Glow, How I Met Your Mother, Broadway’s Cult of Love) and Kerry Bishé (Halt and Catch Fire, Scrubs) and directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt.
Astronaut Mike Turner has been lost in space for seven years when he awkwardly meets his climate scientist wife, Katherine, in a NASA waiting room in the play’s opening scene. We see and hear about the intervening years…how she wore her sexy black dress with the lace to the memorial service Mike’s mother wanted to hold for him and listen in as Katherine sends messages up into space.
The play has a beautiful blue wall set design by Alexander Woodward who also did the costumes. Projection design was by Joey Moro, sound design by Hidenori Nakajo and lighting design by Masha Tsimring. That blue wall holds many small surprises as the space is transformed with the addition of a door or hidden lamp. It’s a hypnotically spare and beautiful production matching Erin Breznitsky’s mysterious and beguiling portrait of this couple always struggling to find their footing with each other and their place on earth, as are we with the play.
The play leaps backwards and forwards in time and has great fun with the characters. Audiences need to get their bearings on what is going on, although I’m not happy to report that there aren’t a lot of laughs in the show. Nothing wrong with the playing, pace or direction, the writer just hasn’t invested much in humor which can be difficult to sit through.
Bishé and Lowell unsurprisingly make a compelling couple to watch and I never lost interest or investment in how this was going to work out…although I did want to wring his neck for a decision late in the play. Bishé is a dream: effervescent, anguished, uncertain…she has seven years of emotions effortlessly expressed quickly and vividly.
I love when sci-fi illuminates the everyday problems of life and presents them to us in a fantastic package where we can study our responses in a “what if” situation. The astronauts' disappearance and return is dealt with all the time whenever we or our partners change. “Oh, you’re going to the gym now? When did that start? Who are you?”
Satellites is a beautiful production of a romance between two individuals constantly in motion.
Satellites is playing through 8/16 at Dorset Theatre Festival. Tickets: www.dorsettheatrefestival.org
