"Constellations"

3-9-15 SHORT HILLS: It’s been warm and sunny for a few days now with no precip for three days. The ice dam issue seems to have resolved and the leaks have stopped. DST has started, but it still seems like winter with a foot of snow in the yard.

Of course, in some other parallel universe, daffodils are in bloom now. That is the premise of Constellations now playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club in this universe, one of an infinite number in the multiverse. Jake Gyllenhaal as Roland, a beekeeper, and Ruth Wilson as Marianne, an astrophysicist, act on a bare black stage under a canopy of lighted balloons.

The plot is simple—boy meets girl, boy marries girl, girl gets sick. Just like a minimalist Love Story. A handful of scenes are repeated for several of the parallel universes, each, naturally, somewhat different. Think of the Goldberg Variations of J. S. Bach [BWV 988].

All the repeats add up to 70 minutes of theatre, each minute fairly expensive. The scenes are played very conventionally forward in time, from meet to grief, but since the Playbill tells us, “Time is an illusion,” perhaps it was more, or less, than 70 minutes and was actually performed backwards or sideways—who really knows?

It’s always interesting to see actors from the big screen, or the little one, perform live. Jake and Ruth were both excellent. [Actually a lot of the big screens are pretty small these days, and the little screens are getting very big.] It probably didn’t take playwright, Nick Payne, more than an afternoon to create this vehicle with just the variations on a few scenes to do. He does deserve credit for the concept.

The house was full, and they got a standing O from the audience, including Judy and me.


Minimal staging with balloons above reflected below on the black stage.

Gyllenhaal and Wilson meet several times...

in different universes.