What If . . . ? CONSTELLATIONS Now at Northern Stage
Boy (beekeeper) meets girl (physicist). It goes well, or goes poorly, or just doesn’t go. What determines what happens next, and then after that, and then . . .?
You don’t have to be a physicist to ask those questions or to watch the possibilities as they unfold between Marianne (Izzie Steele) and Roland (Robert David Grant) in Northern Stage’s Constellations. Whether life is relatively random, or controlled by fate, or is the result of individual decisions (or a combination), something(s) propel us in some direction(s) or other. Marianne the physicist proffers her explanation of the “multiverse,” where a number of futures exist simultaneously and “the decisions we do and don’t make will determine which of these futures we actually end up experiencing.”
Scenes are compact and rapid-fire on stage, with several repetitions of the same dialogue. Part of the audience experience is trying to decipher the differences: a change in fact, a change in tone, physical distance or not between the two characters. Both Steele and Grant are masterful in their abilities to use voice: inflection, emphasis, volume, pauses —as well as bodies: eye contact, head movements, shoulder shrugs, hands by sides or in the air, touch or none, to bring change to near-identical verbiage, each variation following the previous one in a matter of seconds. That they are so convincing in each iteration is testament to their acting talent. And the variations prove what you learned in your college Intro to Psych class: despite what may be carefully chosen words, much, if not most, of communication is nonverbal.
And oh sigh, even the best of love stories (those iterations here that are indeed love stories) get thrown curves. They come in Roland’s and Marianne’s stories more than once. The characters portray varied and sometimes nuanced resolutions.
The set by scenic designer Joey Mendoza is simple, serving the story-telling with multiple levels through which the characters rotate. The third performer in this two-hander is pianist Rose Van Dyne, whose music tends to soften the starkness and stitch the scenes together into a whole. And the explanation of the physics theory behind the show? A dramaturg explains it all in a note in the program that reassures you’ll be okay even if your understanding of things like quantum mechanics is weak, or nonexistent.
As fate would have it, this Olivier Award-winning play lands here in the UV just as the internet keeps repeating the somewhat doubtful and exhausting “finding” that the average person makes 35,000 choices each day. A competing study sets the number at a more reasonable 122. (You can Google both.) Whatever the number of actual decisions we make (and isn’t that disparity just hilarious?), this play will have you and your friends examining the choices you’ve made across your lifetimes or maybe just this morning to see where those choices have led. And to contemplate roads not chosen, words not said, and to ask “What if . . .”
Constellations is directed by BOLD* Assistant Director Sarah Wansley. The play is in mid-run and will be at Northern Stage at the Barrette Center in White River Junction, Vermont through February 11, 2024. Tickets available here.
(*BOLD Women’s Leadership Network is a program funded by the estate of Helen Gurley Brown, designed to make sure that more women are able to move into prominent positions in the American theater community.)
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word..