Seeing Oratorio for Living Things felt less like going to the theater and more like entering a kind of contemporary ritual I didn’t totally understand but immediately felt pulled toward. That sensation starts before anything officially begins. The audience sits on chairs atop steep wooden risers arranged in the round, and the performers scatter throughout the room soon after the audience files in. They move quietly, with a purposeful calm that makes it seem as though the piece has been happening for a long time and we’re just arriving midstream. That choice alone changes the whole atmosphere; instead of waiting for a curtain to rise, it feels like we’re stepping into something already alive.
The work itself doesn’t behave like a conventional musical or play. There’s no storyline to track, no characters to orient us, no arc in the usual sense. Composer Heather Christian builds the entire piece around one central subject she treats almost reverently: Time. Over ninety uninterrupted minutes, a group of singers and musicians guide us through three scales of experience: the quantum, the human, and the cosmic. It sounds incredibly abstract, and in many ways it is, but the piece is surprisingly accessible once you let go of the expectation that it’s something to analyze. It invites you to move through it rather than interpret it, to feel it instead of pinning it down.
The opening act, the quantum scale, is driven primarily by sound and texture. Large stretches of text are in Latin, and the density of the music makes the words blur together. But that doesn’t end up creating distance. If anything, the lack of linguistic clarity becomes a way into the experience. The layered voices rise and recede in patterns that feel almost cellular, like listening to something form at a level beneath language. I stopped focusing on the meaning of individual words and just let the sound settle around me, and that shift made the section feel unexpectedly immersive.
When the oratorio moves into the “human scale,” the tone snaps into focus. This middle act is more literal, more accessible, and surprisingly tender. Memories, confessions, and small life details become a kind of collage—“four hours looking for a scissors,” “two and a half years being too cold,” “eleven days washing your hands,” “six weeks cleaning your desktop”—sung with a directness that contrasts sharply with the abstraction of the first part. The specificity of the lines in vulnerable narratives, like waiting for a mother to return with a new sibling imagined as a “fully grown friend,” or the childhood fear captured in “the lost aloneness in the pit of my stomach,” makes them feel unexpectedly intimate. They capture the way our days are built from countless small, unrecorded moments that shape us far more than we realize. I found myself thinking about my own versions of those units of time, and the quiet honesty of that reflection gave this section an emotional depth I didn’t anticipate.
The final movement pushes outward again into the cosmic scale, and the entire room seems to widen with it. The music becomes more spacious, the lighting softens into a muted palette of ghostly blues and pale golds, and the cloudlike orb, scenic and environmental designer Krit Robinson’s satin-draped centerpiece, above the space continues its slow ascent, glowing in the colors lighting designer Jeanetter Oi-Suk Yew pours into it. Their combined design work makes the space feel unmoored from the theater and gently suspended in something larger. There’s a final moment when the history of the universe is compressed into a single year, and humanity ends up in the last seconds of December 31. It could be an anxiety-producing idea, but the way the performers carry it gives it a gentler meaning. Instead of insignificance, it offers perspective on this idea that “we’re in the middle”.
What ties all of this together is director Lee Sunday Evans’ staging. Being surrounded by the performers, hearing harmonies come from just behind your shoulder or from across the room, creates a shared experience that feels unusually intimate. At some point, I noticed how still I had become, almost unconsciously. The space encourages that stillness without insisting on it. It dissolves the usual separation between performer and audience and creates a roomful of people simply paying attention together. Yet the intimacy has limits: in moments of densely layered music, it can be difficult to focus, and the closeness sometimes magnifies minor distractions or personal restlessness, an audience member shifting repeatedly in their seat or a program dropping and skittering down a steep aisle, reminding the viewer that the immersive design demands a level of sustained engagement not everyone can maintain.
Oratorio for Living Things asks for patience, attentiveness, and willingness to embrace ambiguity. It is not flawless, its complexity can feel daunting, its abstract qualities occasionally isolating, but it is remarkably brave in asking its audience to inhabit scales of time beyond themselves. It’s also one of the few theatrical experiences I’ve had that made me feel both small in the vastness of things and strangely grounded within it. When I stepped out of the theater, I felt a kind of internal quiet I hadn’t noticed I needed. Something in me felt slightly realigned, not dramatically, but enough to make me aware of my own sense of time in a different way.
And honestly, that’s more than I expect from most 90-minute experiences.
‘Oratorio for Living Things’ ran through November 23, 2025 at Signature Theatre Company
