With a title like “Beckett3” – that’s Beckett cubed – you might expect to experience Samuel Beckett through a volume of text, image and sound.

But the Irish playwright, poet and novelist is nowhere to be found in Sledgehammer Theatre’s latest performance installation, though the work’s triad of literary, visual and aural art take Beckett as its inspiration and subject. The Beckett estate does not allow the use of his work out of context, so crafting a deconstructionist project using his words was out of the question for Sledgehammer.

Though his words aren’t used, the three co-creators (thus the mathematical title) evoke the spirit of his bleak and blackly humorous stories. Sledgehammer artistic director and writer Scott Feldsher, composer Tim Root and visual artist Becky Guttin collaborated to bring constantly shifting perspectives to this elusive, esoteric, moody and sometimes whimsical invocation.

All around the empty storefront in the Mission Hills site used for “Beckett3,” the artists have conjured reminiscences of the author’s work, an intangible Beckett phantom flitting here and there.

You enter the installation through a narrow hallway lined with smooth stones. Small square mirrors hang on the walls, bearing Feldsher’s own text, “In A Foreign Country”: a meditation on death, language and meaning – topics that were perennial favorites (obsessions?) for Beckett. The meandering text concerns the death of American theater director Alan Schneider, who was struck by a motorcyclist in London moments after mailing his final letter to the playwright. He also happened to be directing a new Beckett play at the time.

“Americans look to the left for danger, the right to see what the other side is up to and left again to check if anything had changed in the meantime. Left, right and then left again. Left, right, and left. Before crossing streets. Before making turns. Before gossiping. Before loving. Left, right and left again.”

It’s a laborious process to read the mirrors – the dim lighting, the words doubled in the mirror’s reflection, your own bemused mug staring back at you – perhaps not unlike teasing out meaning from Beckett’s dense, relentless prose.

Beyond this hallway the installation opens up, and you are free to wander as you may. Here are more traces of Beckett, in Guttin’s “A Lace Chorus” installation and Root’s rhythmic, cacophonous compositions.

In one piece, Guttin crafted a series of metallic-looking sculptures that hang delicately from the ceiling. Mirrors angled on the floor provide the viewer with a number of vantage points from which to examine the works, while strategically placed lighting throws playful shadows of the shapes across the walls. In another, large sheets of paper covered with calligraphy and hieroglyphs resembling ancient papyrus are encased in glass like museum pieces. A “Peep Show” gives you a view of a nearly empty space with projections of empty rooms, and perhaps a glimpse of another viewer across the way.

Two structures created by Root frame speakers in a grid, with the whole thing spinning freely like a giant aural mobile. The speakers broadcast low-level recorded sound, white noise beneath a lively soundscape of Root’s music and the din of the room. In this art/theater experience, talking, socializing and movement are encouraged. Open rehearsals and live musical presentations are also part of the project; opening night performers included percussionist Nathan Hubbard and musician and noisemaker Scott Paulson, known for his Teeny Tiny Pit Orchestra.

A looped video by David Cannon features more of Feldsher’s text, scrolling rapidly across the screen, so quickly it can’t be grasped in a single viewing. A room titled “Tumba” – “the grave,” in Spanish – features dioramas, video and text, fictionalized instructions left by Schneider on how to remember him in death. The lights shift to various parts of this exhibit, directing our attention in the same way as these last commands to “Wear all black,” “Wear a bowler,” “Remove stone from trouser pocket right place in mouth pause remove a second stone from trouser pocket right…”

Along with Guttin’s artwork housed in display boxes, which can be viewed from a walkway on top or from the side through peepholes, the whole effect of “Beckett3” is one of transience, unbalance, uncertainty. And discovery – there seems to be some new interpretation or secret revealed at every turn. You could take a casual walk through the installation, or you might find yourself wandering for hours.

Those with a cursory knowledge of the author on the cusp of post-modernism will identify some imagery and text – the bowler hats, the sand and stones, a barren tree, the painstakingly detailed stage directions. For literary scholars, the installation becomes a fertile game of Name that Beckett Reference.

In either case, “Beckett3” is a sensory delight that offers many layers of meaning, from many different perspectives – the three artists influenced by Beckett, as well as your own.

Performances at:

4025 Goldfinch St.

San Diego, CA 92103

(Just above Washington Street in Mission Hills)