Constellations
Nick Payne, dir. Michael Longhurst
Samuel J Friedman Theatre, New York City, US
The stage lights rise. A man and woman meet in a cute way – “Do you know why it’s impossible to lick the tips of your elbows?” she asks – they chat momentarily, and separate. The lights blink off and on; the pair resume their previous positions and meet the same way, but with another result. The lights blink again: same people, another permutation. Perturbations continue of the same basic situation, caused by slightly different gestures, phrasings and reactions.
The play is Constellations by Nick Payne, and it first opened in 2012 to an enthusiastic reception in a 90-seat space at London’s Royal Court Theatre. It is now on Broadway at the 622-seat Samuel J Friedman Theatre, where it is scheduled to run through to at least 15 March. It also has a UK tour coming soon. The man is Roland, the woman is Marianne, and they are standing on a platform of dark hexagonal tiles, beneath and surrounded by huge white (sometimes blue or purple) balloons. They could be ordinary people in a party room, huge people in space surrounded by stars, or tiny people surrounded by atoms. The staging changes slightly as the actors proceed through turning points in a relationship: meeting, seduction, marriage, betrayal, impending death. The choice of scenes, and their variations, are not random but diverge in key ways: the pair sleeps together, they don’t; he’s unfaithful, then she is; the tumour is benign, the tumour has metastasized and affects her speech, and so forth.
Variations on a scene is an age-old theatrical device. In Constellations it appears to acquire new meaning due to the characters’ professions: Roland is a bee-keeper, Marianne a quantum cosmologist. Through Marianne’s explanations of her work the author seems to prime us to view the play as a kind of “multiverse”, containing slightly branching paths from the same starting point.
Does it work? It depends. I saw the Broadway incarnation from the last row of the balcony. A friend of mine, a successful playwright, saw it from the third row. We had different reactions, and the two taken together answer that question.
Replaying a scene with variations is a common theatrical idea. It was used, for instance, in Sure Thing (1993) a 10-minute play by David Ives in which a couple on a blind date keep restarting their conversation until they romantically connect, and in Alan Ayckbourn’s series of plays Intimate Exchanges (1983). The film Sliding Doors (1998) depicts two different paths that a character’s life may take as the outcomes of one turning point, as does the musical If/Then (2014). To me, up in the balcony, much of Constellations seemed like a repeat of this familiar theatrical device; it was like watching an acting exercise: “Let’s try it this way!” Since the branching paths in this 70-minute play only last a minute or so, just as you begin to take any particular vignette seriously, or see a character begin to crystallize, the sequence ends and another begins. You care less about any one character because you are asked to care about so many fleeting ones. I did get caught up, however, by Marianne’s impending death: all paths come to an end, her mortality reinforced by the falling of the balloons/stars/atoms in the final variations.
On the other hand, my friend in the third row was enthusiastic. “Theatrical fireworks!” he said. “It’s not like Sure Thing. This play takes us to deeper emotions and darker places.” From close up, he appreciated how expertly the actors – Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson – made full and instant commitment to each variation, which is not easy to do without tripping into caricature. “Maybe it’s not a great addition to dramatic literature, but it offers the opportunity for great performances – which is a different thing.” My friend also thought the play was successful in forging characters out of multiple short variations. “This play shows us the core of a character – how a single person behaves in different ways in response to different stimuli. The different variations allow you to see the same character logic.”
My friend and I also differed on the use of scientific language. Using the atomic world as a metaphor for human interactions is a familiar literary device, reaching all the way back to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in the 1st century BC and continuing in the present day (Björk’s latest album, released in January, includes a song called “Atom dance”). Such atomic language is not necessarily insightful: while it can be used to develop genuine insights, as in some John Updike novels and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, it can also become a mere gimmick. I found Marianne’s lines about multiverses, quantum theory, relativity and string theory distracting; I heard them as the author trying to give us the key to the play and the human interactions in it, and it didn’t open any doors. Roland’s discourses on beekeeping – an activity that requires an immense amount of practical knowledge in observing nature while controlling it – offer a better metaphorical grip on the human condition. Yet their characters’ personas imply that Marianne’s cosmological language is more profound. My fears seemed to be realized when, after Marianne outlines the difference between relativity and quantum mechanics, Roland gazes her and says, “This is really sexy, by the way!” My friend, on the other hand, wasn’t bothered by the quantum language, hearing it as Marianne talking to Roland, whose interest she wants to encourage and who she knows won’t get it, rather than to the audience.
Constellations‘ cast has star power; the audience applauds Gyllenhaal and Wilson the minute they walk onstage before they’ve even said anything, and waits for them in long lines at the stage door exit afterwards. Is it a successful play? That depends on who’s performing it, how close you sit, and how forgiving you are of physics terms used outside the laboratory.
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