Presented with Fusebox
Robin Frohardt—the visionary behind the critically acclaimed Plastic Bag Store (TPA ’22) and a 2024 Herb Alpert Award-winner—returns to Austin with a new, genre-defying live-cinema performance.
For 15 years, Frohardt has lived across from a Home Depot parking lot—an unremarkable view that became a source of personal and cultural reflection. Her new project, Shopping Center of the Universe, explores the loss of identity, community, and connection to nature in a world shaped by asphalt, big-box store sprawl, and endless consumer rhythm. Through a hand-built cardboard set, live puppetry, and cinematic projection, the work reimagines the parking lot as part of the ecosystem, blurring the line between the natural and the constructed. It’s a meditation on the quiet poetry of overlooked spaces—and what they reveal about the world we’ve built.
This inventive work of speculative nonfiction uses the ordinary to ask thoughtful questions: How does anything—even a parking lot—exist outside the natural world? Or are parking lots themselves a kind of naturally occurring phenomenon? Billions of years ago, a few cells began to divide, and now there are 3,400 Home Depot locations. These facts are not unrelated.
At once playful and profound, Shopping Center of the Universe invites audiences into a richly layered reflection on modern life—and the uneasy beauty found in its most overlooked corners.
Plastic Bag Store Press from Texas Performing Arts' 2022 Season
What you'll see at the outlandish 'Plastic Bag Store,' an immersive art space in Austin - Austin American-Statesman
A new grocery store is open in Austin. But don't eat the produce. - KUT
How The Plastic Bag Store hopes to make Austinites think twice about plastic and packaging - CBS Austin
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