As you enter the Ontological Theater for 31 Down's retro-techy audio freakout Universal Robots, be careful picking a chair: You may plop yourself in the lap of a polite naked gentleman sitting in the audience. He's Josef Capek (Thom Sibbitt), brother and soulmate to Karel (Justin Tolley), the Czech novelist and playwright who introduced the concept of robots in 1921. Later, Karel would explain that Josef actually invented the term, derived from the Slavic robota, meaning forced labor. Why Josef is nude and in the bleachers becomes clear later in the play. Sorta. The brothers, whose lives were cut short by the Nazis, are the twin focus of this abstract experiment in audio-imagistic theater.

Director Shannon Sindelar, who wrote the script with Ryan Holsopple, draws upon Karel's diverse writings, which cover everything from European geopolitics to gardening, and quotes from his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) to create a rich, spooky tapestry of radio transmissions, voiceovers (as if we're hearing thoughts) and assorted sonic arcana. Over this flow of sound she stages her actors in slow, eerie tableaux, touching obliquely on themes of nature versus machine, animals versus objects and reproduction versus mass production. Jonathan Valuckas makes a brief, creepy appearance as Domin, the manager of a robotics factory who drools over Helena (Kelly Tuohy). Fittingly, you don't know whether he lusts after her young flesh or the facsimile he could make thereof.
- David Cote, TimeOut New York

"31 Down is an amazing and groundbreaking company and their work deserves a broad audience."

"Individuals and their fortunes within natural law move me very little," stated H.P. Lovecraft in a letter from 1934. "The only 'heroes' I can write about are phenomena."

Director Ryan Holsopple, clearly awestruck by the early-20th-century master of horror and science fiction, stays loyal to this lofty aesthetic with Metronoma. The utterly gnomic but compelling multimedia homage to Lovecraft and his fictional mythology rolls together aliens, antique technology and mind-shattering spiritual enlightenment. By the work's final tableau, in which-if I have this right-Lovecraft's brain is being slurped by a green-tentacled, bulbous-headed alien, and a video screen pivots to reveal a smoking space pod, you realize the play has moved beyond the late-Victorian sitting room in which it begins.

Holsopple, who also portrays Robert Bloch, the eventual author of Psycho and a friend of Lovecraft's (who's played with keen, sensitive strangeness by Valuckas), creates a highly original theater of images, in which wordless scenes are accompanied by a soundtrack that combines voiceover and cryptic sound effects. The "action" of this digressive dreamscape concerns Bloch in his hotel room, preparing to visit Lovecraft, whom we also see at home writing and hosting a bizarre tea party for invisible guests. Shauna Kelly portrays the title creature, a wood nymph (or alien?) who scolds and teases Lovecraft for his immaturity. Lurking beneath the surreal video projections and deliciously creepy sound design, there's actually a conventional cherchez l'auteur narrative. But, like his subject, Holsopple flirts with human affairs only to sugarcoat his larger cosmic obsessions.
- David Cote, TimeOut New York

"...the moods that Holsopple and his collaborators are able to evoke are deep and many, and even though I didn't intellectually 'get' what was happening much of the time in Metronoma, I found myself responding viscerally to it throughout..."

"That's Not How Mahler Died is a living, breathing entity that will lure you in, wash over you, entrance you, and, finally, empty you out. 31Down Radio Theater and especially creator-director-designer Ryan Holsopple have built the kind of experience within the walls of the Brick Theater that eludes most theatre most of the time."

"The company's name may be 31 Down radio theater, but despite an exquisite and indispensable soundtrack, That's Not How Mahler Died is not a radio play. Far from it: though stillness and silence play a crucial role in the richly ambient proceedings, it's the moments of intimate physicality that stay with you longest: a mouth sucking the last drop of medicine from a tiny spoon; the absentminded swinging of a woman's leg; the heartbroken folding of a letter.
The primary wonder of radio as a medium is that, by withholding visual information, it makes the listener's imagination an accomplice in the creative act. Though its events unfold in three physical dimensions before us, That's Not How Mahler Died reflects radio in that it too withholds vital information and allows the viewer's imagination to fill in the vast crevasses that remain...
The piece is a technical triumph."

"One piece that does have some poetic resonance is an audio work by 31 Down Radio Theater, in which a voice that sounds a little like President Bush's sadly and humbly intones a litany of apologies for things he has done, from running for president to invading Iraq. It is surprisingly moving."

"And 31 Down played a dense, throbbing piece with film noir dialogue samples while he snapped photographs, ate donuts and used a coffee cup to trigger buzzes and swoops."

"It's not all blood and guts. The radio theater group 31 Down collaborated on a sound sensory room outfitted to look like a private eye's office. A bumpy floor covering produces screams, rattles, and wails in response to where the room's investigators tread. The word 'KILL' is scrawled on a subway map over the Delancy street F-train stop, which is the closest to the cultural center."

"Truly 'Undertow' (one of the great film noir titles), as this oral collage sucks you into a smoke-filled vanished past."