Constellations
Nick Payne
The Pear Theatre
He is a beekeeper. She is a Cambridge physicist. She can wax on forever starry eyed about subjects like quantum mechanics, string theory, and cosmology. He likes to explain how female bees are the workers and male drones exist only to have sex with the queen, after which their penises are ripped off and they die. She believes in a multiverse where there are different versions of ourselves making a range of decisions that are maybe the same, maybe different. He is more comfortable with the idea of order, with our choices laid out for us from birth — much like the world of bees. And yet they meet, date, and marry — or not, according to to which version of themselves they are currently experiencing.
In Nick Payne’s Constellations, multiple possibilities of the milestone interactions that occur over the lifetime of one couple’s relationship play out in scenes that often repeat in slightly different versions of the same situation. From the moment Marianne and Roland meet and move through their on-and-off again dating, marriage proposal, and moments of triumph and heartbreak, variations of the same situation flash before us on stage in short sequences of what might have happened, hopefully did not happen, and maybe actually did happen. Scenes of the future pop up way before they actually occur, quite in keeping with Marianne’s belief that time is irrelevant and that past, present, and future can exist simultaneously somewhere in alternative universes.
Written as a two-hander and performed as such since its 2012 premiere on the West End, Broadway, and many regional theaters throughout the country, Constellations is given an innovative, insightful, and invigorating twist by director Reed Flores in the current production by The Pear Theatre. Three couples switch among themselves in over fifty scenes the roles of Marianne and Roland during the ninety-minute (no intermission) production — scenes that often begin with the same lines by each couple but then take different paths to perhaps totally different outcomes.
Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the remaining of my review.
Rating: 5 E
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Constellations continues through July 20, 2025 in a ninety-minute (no intermission) production by The Pear Theatre, 1110 La Avenida, Suite A, Mountain View, CA. Tickets are available at https://www.thepear.org/.
Photo Credits: Reed Flores
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