Pat Sirant

Upfront, I will say that if you love emotionally complicated interpersonal drama, this is right up your alley. It's very much an intimate realtionship story with a sci fi twist to it.

What I Liked:

The acting is IMMACULATE, both actors shine in this, bouncing between the present of a relationship disintegrating under the weight of diverging life goals and not being able to see each other's side, and the past of flirtation turning into romance between two colleagues with two planets' worth of eyes on them. Both performers sell it wonderfully, and the actor playing S especially was great at getting across the energy of feeling trapped by someone else's ambitions and unable to get out.

The staging was beautiful and simple, the lighting set up of the swirling red lights on the roof and the star projectors is really something to see. Without spoiling anything, a frequently repeated phrase in the present-segments is that the female character S "is starlight" and there's a beautiful moment where you SEE it, the actress stood still with the red swirls and green laser-lines reflecting off her.

Also with the staging, the props looked great, the cobbled-together radio made of a busted CRT held together with zipties and string was really cool, especially for how prominent it is.

What Lost Me:

The pacing is strange. The formatting of the short segments not lasting more than a few minutes (sometimes only a few seconds) and bouncing back and forth between the past on Mars and present on Jupiter made it feel so much longer than it actually was. Felt like there was more transition music than play, at points.

this is not a knock on the show and more of a me thing, but I went in blind with only the name of the show and a ticket, and I think I was expecting something much different than what it was. At its core it's about two people who fall in love and fracture apart because one wants constantly bigger and better things without considering the costs and dangers that come with and the other wants a simple quiet life away from the influence of the legacy of their parents. It's just that that legacy is, y'know, colonizing Mars, and the bigger better things are reaching other celestial bodies in experimental spacecraft. Admittedly, I like my sci fi a lot less grounded, and this is not the kind of story I would purposely seek out.

With the way the story is laid out, the main conflict of the present timeline got a bit repetitive.

Honestly, it's a very interesting well realized piece that just is not for me. There's a lot you could dig into, in this, especially in piecing the story together. But if I had the choice of seeing it again, I don't think that I would.