Where did we come from? Where do we belong? What if we never find out the answer to either of those? Or what if we do – but only once we’ve realized how nice the place we are is, after all? These are all questions I think Aurora asks, and questions I came away from it pondering.

I love the dichotomy between the last play I reviewed in Austin – downtown, produced within an inch of its life, polished til it shines, air-conditioned – and Aurora, performed way up where MoPac becomes a toll road, in front of a shipping container in the backyard of a house-turned-art gallery owned by a pet psychic. The seats at Aurora aren’t cushioned; they’re school desks. An actual car pulls up alongside the stage at one point! Aurora‘s playwright himself, Chris Fontanes, poured me my drink before the show. There’s something so wonderfully scrappy about site-specific theater like Aurora, which removes much of the “imagine this!” of the traditional stage. I don’t need to imagine (or judge how well the actors are imagining) sharing a beer and a joint out in a field in the dark, because they’re doing it right there, while I watch. When Anne (Bonnie Lambert) points at a star, the audience follows her gaze up to the sky. When Aurora (Rosemary McGraw) screams and waves her sparklers to the emptiness around her, it’s easy for houses and roads and parked cars to melt away. Life isn’t always shiny and easy, so why should all theater be? (Please do not read this to imply any difference in quality or enjoyment.)

The only thing about the setting that could be a complaint is the ambient freeway noise, which can’t be helped, but is a little funny when multiple characters refer to “how quiet” their setting is while shouting over MoPac traffic. This is just one of the perils of outdoor theater, and it’s really the only disbelief that Aurora asks us to suspend for a while.

The cast of Aurora is small and entirely female. Aurora (McGraw, earnest and passionate and ever so relatable to anyone who has ever felt “on the outside”), on the eve of her 30th birthday, is searching for her place in the universe – literally – with a homemade receiver out in nowheresville, Texas. During the night, she spends time with two other women. First, a friend and coworker, Andi (Cassandra DeFreitas, whose natural nonchalance is a fun foil to McGraw) joins her, but Andi’s much more interested in getting drunk and high and maybe getting laid than she is in Aurora’s desire to meet her extraterrestrial family. Later, Aurora meets a mysterious stranger named Anne (Lambert), who’s just weird enough that she might be the answer to Aurora’s calls…or maybe not. Throughout their conversations, these women share poetry, music, ideas, theories. All hinge on the main question: Why do you want to leave earth? I’m not sure Aurora’s mind wasn’t changed by the end of the play.

Throughout the show, the audience gets to hear the music Aurora plays through her headphones, which is a wonderful device. I have only one critique, which is that the emotional resonance of a scene near the end of the show seems to hinge on the emotional resonance of the Pink Floyd song we’re listening to – it feels like the language of film or dance rather than theater. But maybe Aurora isn’t speaking our language, anyway. After all, this wasn’t a “traditional theater experience” in many ways. Maybe the truth is that sometimes laying on your back and listening to Pink Floyd on an iPod is just as much of the truth as anything a playwright can write.

Photo: Zac Stafford

Aurora closed at the Paper Plate Gallery on May 19, 2024 (I am extremely late in posting this review and beg forgiveness). For more info and to read the program, visit Bottle Alley online.