I’m recommending Constellations to every actor and acting teacher I know. This is the scene-study class taken to its highest level. Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson accomplish the nearly impossible task of keeping us fascinated while repeating the same scene over and over. For the most part, these are mundane encounters featuring a man and a woman meeting and ultimately ending up together. Along the way, they encounter the kind of pain and tragedy which is the stuff both of life and of drama. The premise is so simple, we find ourselves surprised to be solidly invested.
Costumes are nondescript; shades of pink for her, blue for him. There’s no scenery but a flock of white balloons floating from the ceiling and along the sides. The balloons subtly change color with the lighting.
Roland and Marianne are two pretty ordinary people, although you rarely meet anyone with their jobs. He’s a beekeeper; she’s a Cambridge University academic whose field is theoretical cosmology. When she spouts string theory and other highfalutin physics terms, we’re as stumped as Roland. But somehow, it all ties in with a play which lists “Place: The Multiverse” and “Time: Past, Present, and Future” in the Playbill.
In life, we turn right or we turn left; and that makes all the difference. What if Roland had been married, engaged, or just getting over a bad breakup when he and Marianne first meet? What if he found her insistence that there’s a cosmic reason no one can kiss his own elbow too weird to continue talking to her? What if a bad diagnosis were instead an assurance that a full recovery is expected? Do we react so personally because we’ve imagined just this type of scenario shift in our own life?
Wilson and Gyllenhaal are nothing short of emotional quick change artists. They go from flirting to rage to despair in split seconds, and each quick scene is completely genuine and convincing. Director Michael Longhurst has done a masterful job of clearing away any sort of conventional theatrical debris which might divert attention from the pared down, often stark, emotions and interaction onstage. Never has a Broadway theater seemed more intimate. Even the difference in English accents--Wilson’s more refined, Gyllenhaal’s more working man--strikes exactly the right chord.
Nick Payne’s writing displays a touching delicacy. Contrast it with the similarly themed If/Then, which is clunky and loud, and there’s no contest. My only reservation about this play is that I shudder to think of it in meatier hands. With Ruth Wilson and Jake Gyllenhaal on the boards, Constellations is a ballet of yearning, touching, fulfillment, and dreams of what might have been.
