“Spacestation 1985” director and producer Jeff Miller and his co-producer, Natalie George, first met as students at St. Edward’s University.

The pair has been working on the original play since 2009, performing workshops in New York City and constantly revising the script. The play was dedicated to investigating the wear of isolation on the human mind.

With the assistance of $5,000 from donors on Kickstarter.com as well as money out of the cast and crew’s own pockets and assistance from grants,  they are finally seeing the play they have worked on for so long reach its full potential.

The lights dimmed and two beams of light fell on the stage to illuminate the sole two actors, teasing the audience with the intricate stage behind them.

“Spacestation 1985” is a comedy about Dr. Rick Gergen and Lieutenant Norman Kilroy, two NASA rejects destined for failure, and their journey into space as well as the slow and steady deterioration of their mental health.

The characters know little of their private investors who have requested them to take on the mission of being the first humans to harvest minerals from the tail of Halley’s Comet.

The pair wakes in turn as they alternate the responsibilities of monitoring the ship in month-long intervals. They communicate only through logs and notes for their entire six-month trip to the comet.

Together they begin to uncover the truth of their mysterious mission as well as discovering the pain of complete lack of human contact.

The loneliness felt by the two characters manifests itself in very different ways. In the foolhardy Lieutenant Norman Kilroy it comes as paranoia, seeing doom lurking in every corner of the ship.

Dr. Norman Gergen must find friendship, and even love, in unusual places, possibly within his own mind.

Never once was the set carted out and replaced by another, but the viewer’s interest was still constantly arrested by the superb utilization of limited space.

Through the control of lights and the assistance of original music by local composer Graham Reynolds, the production was able to create a dynamic piece without needing much in the way of setting.

At times, puppets would act as substitutions for the actors or take on a life of their own.

This served to create a diversity in medium to break up the series of witty monologues that would be the main driving points of a play.

The play ran from Sept. 13 through Sept. 22 at the Off Center.