Into the Empty Sky at Trap Door Theatre

Chicago Tribune - Recommended

"...There isn't an obvious narrative arc here, but what Payne and her ensemble build instead is an increasing sense of the urgent need to move from darkness into light. Eleanor Kahn's cavelike set, with six lanterns overhead, suggests Plato's allegory of the cave. (Richard Norwood provided the chiaroscuro lighting design) It's a purgatorial world of recursive words and memories, which the women sometimes anatomize through a series of mirror exercises in which they move with metronomic precision. (Mike Mazzocca's live percussive underscoring sets the beat without distracting from the internal rhythms of the poetry.)"

Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended

"...he language is spare and almost skeletal, but the women's acting humanizes their struggle. Through repetitive phrases and gestures, dramatic light design, and accordion and metronome music played by composer Mike Mazzocca while perched above the stage, this show casts a spell which lingers long after one leaves that bare, woebegone room."

ChicagoCritic - Recommended

"...As always, a recommendation to see a Trap Door production comes with a slight qualification: this ain't The Goodman main stage: think all the parodies you've ever seen of experimental theatre-now imagine them actually being sophisticated and engrossing, because even at its most esoteric, this piece was just that. That said, I think there's more to get out of it than I did: in this case, the power of the poetry might depend on the experience you bring to it; I myself felt there was some unspecifiable something missing that would really register the pathos in my gut. Nevertheless, even a novice poet like myself could recognize and appreciate the beauty of Into the Empty Sky."

Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended

"...Payne's selections and direction make tangible the confusing experience of lurching between normality and horror. I was struck many times by the actresses' sometimes frantic, but always fluid, ways of expressing how one hardens in response to desperate circumstances to a point of not knowing oneself. Since watching the performance, I've been pouring over Map. Szymborska wasn't all gloom and doom, but she did communicate her generation's experience of the war and life behind the Iron Curtain in a manner that was all the more chilling for taking such a cerebral approach to her own pain. Into the Empty Sky pays worthy tribute to her."

NewCity Chicago - Somewhat Recommended

"...“Into the Empty Sky” though, can often lack life. The jittering mechanical motions that the cast return to in time with the metronome represent the automatons that refugees become, only existing in the context of something they can’t control. When the metronome vanishes, they become lucid and struggle to regain their footing. This footing is rarely found despite the cast’s best efforts: they all live in a sense of anonymity that, despite the items found within the luggage (dirt, several shoes) and the stories these objects tell, the actors are bound by the words of Symborska and the names found in the program, all of which are a variation of “The [descriptor] One.”"