Having seen it in progress more or less complete at Link’s Hall last month, I watched Erin Carlisle Norton’s Stops on the Line Friday able to focus on how she set the piece into Epiphany’s cavernous nave.
It sits with permanent purpose like a slab foundation poured into an excavation.
Excavation, in fact, is an apt descriptor of how Stops feels. A key ingredient of its hard-to-pinpoint tension comes from its slow, inexorable travel in two directions: East, and down. Throughout its lean runtime—an hour or so—it’s carving itself out of a rind; like a single shape being hollowed out, its progression makes the membrane separating its world from ours increasingly fragile. And while there’s no hard setting aside from the room itself (a few costumes match the walls’ colors perfectly), there’s for me an explicit referencing of the late 1920s, the cusp of the Great Depression and the birth of Union Station, Daniel Burnham’s building (which inspired the piece and the anniversary of whose urban plan occasions it).
trailerpilot 