Theater Review: ‘Satellites,’ Dorset Theatre Festival

Pulling two people apart in a drama can show us what connected them, provided the connection is still sparking. Playwright Erin Breznitsky separates a married scientist and her astronaut husband in the most monumental way: He is lost in space for seven years, then found alive. The majority of Satellites portrays the gulf that time has gouged between them, and the Dorset Theatre Festival production conveys such physical and emotional distance that their reunion might be sadder than their separation. Space travel is more allegory than science fiction in this exploration of time, memory and human closeness.

The production’s set, projections, lighting and sound establish a powerful, conceptual style. The audience arrives to find a wall of stormy dark blue planks downstage. The first scene, in which Mike and Katherine are reunited at NASA, is played against the wall’s pitiless blankness: a heightened abstraction in counterpoint to realistic dialogue.

For the next scene, the backdrop rolls away to reveal a deep box with solid walls of the same blue planks. Furniture rolls on and off, often through hatches that swing up or doors that swing open. Realistic props are used sparingly. Two people come and go, but the box is so much bigger than anything that passes through it that we are largely seeing emptiness.

For much of the play, emptiness is the story, and our discomfort with emptiness is the experience the playwright, performers and director seem to want to deliver. I’m left wondering whether the play succeeds at an odd, unsettling objective or fails at a romantic one. Breznitsky’s play premiered in 2023, and she’s workshopped it since; the text evolved further during rehearsals at Dorset. It may continue to change, moving toward an immensely tender story that’s only hinted at now or retain the sense of desolation I felt.

Satellites consists of nonchronological vignettes, including flashbacks of Mike and Katherine falling in love and facing career and parenting decisions. These scenes have warmth and humor, but we see them through the lens of what will be lost. The unsettling part is that these charming, well-crafted flashbacks don’t make us yearn for the characters to reclaim what they had.

In contrast, the scenes in which Mike and Katherine contemplate resuming their marriage after the tremendous amount of time they’ve spent apart are hollow encounters. The characters are reluctant, in limbo, and only near the end does the playwright introduce conflict about accepting the end of the relationship. Structurally, this fight comes too late — a viewer may have long given up on this couple. Emotionally, the scene is the play’s peak.

All the other post-return scenes leave the characters so stiff with uncertainty that the production has trouble finding momentum. From the first reunion scene, Mike and Katherine are unwilling to touch each other. Perhaps the playwright intends it as a vivid expression of distance, but it goes against the overwhelming impulse to feel the warmth of someone who’s been missing, to feel someone is real. Breznitsky slices this instinct off, but if her characters don’t want contact, they don’t really want anything.

Still, that empty box is sometimes filled with eloquence. Solo scenes during the separation approach a lyrical magic. Katherine sits outside looking up into the night sky, speaking to Mike on a symbol of communication, the baby monitor they bought together before he left. Mike describes the grace of orbiting the Earth and the psychological instability of being alone long enough to question his prior reality.

Christopher Lowell, as Mike, and Kerry Bishé, as Katherine, are consistently fascinating to watch. Lowell makes Mike’s struggle for reorientation a tough internal battle, with quiet poignance. And his portrayal of Mike’s romance with Katherine reveals the character’s cool humor as well as his very warm attention to a woman difficult to charm. Throughout, Lowell keeps Mike hard to predict, with all his feelings at risk of being buried or dangerously exposed.

Bishé is arresting in monologues spoken to the stars during Mike’s seven-year absence. She lets the privacy of the night and the lost cause of the distant sky give the character courage to face a sadness that feels as unreal as Mike’s unknown end. And in flashbacks when Katherine interacts with Mike, Bishé conveys shimmering intelligence that is first what attracts Mike and later what equips her to mourn him.

Bishé and Lowell are married in real life, which, ironically, might allow them to weather the show’s detached dialogue better. Certainly the performers, and the text, are at their best in the one fight they have, when conflict might finally pull them together.

Director Adrienne Campbell-Holt moves the actors with keen attention to space. The young Mike and Katherine sit close together on a vast beach and then, in the present day, keep their distance in a reconciliation that can’t get started. Campbell-Holt makes subtle use of the script’s symmetries over time, connecting disjointed episodes into one smooth, comprehensible story. The humor stands out like little jewels in a text of deep ruminations.

Using small details inside big spaces, scenic designer Alexander Woodward grounds each scene with a dash of reality while keeping the play’s large abstractions the visual center. A patio at night, for example, is nothing more than a lawn chair, an outdoor light on a wall and a white sliding door. But around the actors are projections, by Joey Moro, that capture the faint glow of a night sky and hint at the infinity of space. Lighting designer Masha Tsimring and sound designer Hidenori Nakajo produce stunning effects that startle, soothe and challenge the audience.

The play has only one line, and one gesture, that express the passion of connection. Satellites uses innovative methods of showing the sweet and shaky journey toward a relationship and the crater that forms with its loss. While a happy ending feels too easy, the void here is as dark as space. Unless that one gesture is all that matters.

This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2025.

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