Passage

Bottle Alley Theatre Company is bringing Passage to Smelt House (2511 E 6th St) this summer, and it's a radio play, which means you're listening to the story unfold rather than watching a traditional stage production. The run is spread across three weekends: July 17-19, July 23-25, and July 29 through August 1, so you've got a few different windows to catch it.

Passage was created by The Heartland Theatre Collective. The story follows the nine crew members of the Aquarius 300, who are searching for a new planet to terraform when they get pulled into the gravitational forces of a black hole. From there, it turns inward: the crew is forced to confront questions of love, loss, and faith. It's a space-set premise that spends its time on the people inside the ship rather than the science outside it.

Bottle Alley has been around since 2012 as a group of independent, experimental theatre artists. They describe their work as 'D.I.Y. punk theatre,' and they specialize in found-space theatre and the theatre of cruelty—the kind of company that prefers an unconventional room to a polished stage. Smelt House fits that found-space approach, and the radio play format keeps the focus on the voices and the sound.

The show runs about 90 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. With the dates spread across three weekends, you can pick whichever one works best for your schedule.