![]() I found immense pleasure in watching Beirne, who accepts Marianne’s mortality with a deep equanimity (“We have all the time we’ve always had”) not just when she is speaking, but when she is listening. The challenge for Marianne (Bridget Beirne) and Roland (Sean Patrick Hopkins) is to play out different scenarios of their relationship yet maintain a consistency of character throughout the fragmentation. The production is a choreography of sound and light and action – a kind of cosmic dance - in a compact space. From the very start, the pair are determined to make a sparkling spectacle of Constellations. ![]() It’s no coincidence that Gus Kaikkonen has not only has directed the actors, but also designed the set in careful collaboration with John Eckert, the lighting designer. Believe me, there is no tedium in the Peterborough Players’ production. The rhythm of the plot’s cues and responses are well paced its physics and metaphysics never become tedious. Constellations is a brief, fast-moving play whose dramatic weight has been carefully modulated. Payne had the wisdom, once he established his conceit, not to overdo its complexity. An underlying sense of mortality provides a target for the nonexistent arrow of time. Gravity may be a ‘weak’ force, but it keeps Constellations grounded. The loopiness demands a light-footed quickness from the actors Constellations could easily stumble into cuteness. Six or seven times the same words, the same cues, lead to slightly different responses, and these responses then serve up conflicting cues. This is a play that rolls around and around, dramatic possibilities multiplying and multiplying. Constellations are, after all, only patterns our eye makes in our mind, not actualities. ![]() “At any moment several outcomes can exist simultaneously” this is the very antithesis of Western tragedy.Įven embedded this expansive web of potentiality, love still means never having to say you’re sorry. The philosophical ache in this conventional love story comes from the playful suggestion that no action is really inevitable, even if it seems to end in death. Constellations brings us to a point that seems to be definitive, but then provides a myriad of other possibilities. Classical tragedy generally leaves us with the certainty of an end. While the script tells the most conventional of love stories - courtship, conflict, complacency, death - the drama presents the audience with a stuttering multiplicity of forking paths. Nick Payne’s Constellations takes the cosmic paradoxes of time head on. But the curtain still rises (if only metaphorically) at the beginning and falls at the end. They have rolled with it, run it backwards, stopped it completely, and turned it circular. Playwrights for several generations now have wrestled with the limitations of time on stage. ![]() (Some stage managers take this for granted.) In its extreme formulation, everything that can happen does happen. Only - philosophers and physical scientists have taught us, there is no arrow, just our shaky intellectual construct of an arrow. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. The nature of theatrical performance is that it takes place in linear time. Partially, the second version mitigates the problem of having the two actors have to age from teenagers to octogenarians within 90 minutes - by instead playing the original characters' grandchildren in the second version but this alternative proves even more unsatisfying than the original denouement.Bridget Beirne as Marianne and Sean Patrick Hopkins as Roland in the Peterborough Players production of “Constellations.” Photo: Dana Angellis. Thirdly, Payne provides two different third acts, written a decade apart, since he was never satisfied with the original version - and again shillyshallies about how to end the damn thing. Such indecisiveness in a play drives me crazy - tell me what you intend/want - otherwise you just seem to be flailing about. The second 'mistake' is that the author constantly suggests various staging 'alternatives': i.e, 'maybe' they do this 'perhaps' this happens. ![]() This entry suffers from quite a few problems - the most egregious being that on the 2nd page a character talks about having killed his pet cat before heading off to fight in the Second World War - as a cat lover, it's a fatal error from which I could never quite recover. When he's 'on', he's excellent ( Elegy Incognito) - but when he's off, as here - well. This is now the 7th play by this playwright I've read, and he's been rather hit or miss for me. ![]()
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