José Rivera describes his Sonnets for an Old Century as taking place in simply “the afterlife.” To further specify the production’s location visually and philosophically, designer Liviu Pasare, in collaboration with visual artist Jorge Felix,created an evocative video landscape to capture the sense of being adrift in time. How did you begin thinking about what that afterlife would look like physically as well as conceptually? The moment the play is working with—the first recognition of an afterlife in the context of recent death—is a moment of greatness and empowerment, as well as concurrent ubiquity and elusiveness. It is a global myth that transcends cultures and ages, that inspires people and frightens them. I am exploring this from a science of the mind perspective and I’m visually inspired by Jorge {Felix}’s vision of a sugar cane field and the processes of growing and harvesting of which burning is an essential part. We’ve drawn connections between that and the circulation that’s intrinsic to stories, be those the ones presented in the play or otherwise. How do you think incorporating video elements into this liveaction production changes the experience? The video medium is there to conceptualize the stories as told, and to enhance the audiences’ experience. As always, we are concerned with the multimedia nature of video, as accustomed as our culture is to multi tasking. The purpose of the video is to try and make the audience feel that this is the world that the characters inhabit.