NONE: A PRACTICAL BREVIARY, a reimagined monastic 3pm mass—traditionally set to the commemoration of Jesus’s death on the cross—is the next in Heather Christian’s Practical Breviary series and seeks to beautify a moment to leave our busy fractured world and all its noise for long enough to recover from it. NONE is an event more than a traditional musical, a light and sound feast (environment and light design by Jeanette Yew) and features a 13-member ensemble led by Christian as cantor to explore and excavate this feeling of abandonment by the divine, mirrored in a walk out into space. Rather than a linear narrative, NONE is adapted from the traditional Psalms of the 3pm monastic masses paired with ancient mystic Sufi texts, planetary treatises by Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, as well as Meister Eckhart sermons—we walk out into space to confront God in the “heavens” and sing our questions to the seeming void. The music is lush, an infusion of gospel, classical, neo-soul and rock, played by a teacup orchestra alongside NASA field recordings from our solar system. This version at New York Stage and Film is the first time this material will be heard and is the beginning of a larger process/investigation into how light and sound can marry and make a new kind of expressive storytelling—SAF audiences are invited to be with us mid-process while starting to crack open that very important piece of the show. As with Christian’s other breviary masses, NONE is a secular riff on a mass for atheists and agnostics and amateur physicists and devouts of all religions in this specific time of social injustice, political rage, environmental catastrophe and pervading anxiety that hopes to shine enough light on the wound to treat it.

NONE is produced with permission by and support from the Manhattan Theatre Club.

NONE is commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club.

Supported in partnership with Dean and Denise Vanech, with additional support provided by Jean-Luc Sinniger.