Shopping Center Parking Lot 

Robin Frohardt
Presented in partnership with Texas Performing Arts

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 Parking Lot, 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 Parking Lot invites audiences into a richly layered reflection on modern life—and the uneasy beauty found in its most overlooked corners.