'Constellations' at Wilma Theater: Alternative lives, simultaneously
What if our universe was really a multiverse, our life just one of many potential lives? What if time wasn't linear, but circular, that an infinity of alternative choices and outcomes coexisted?
The show's unlikely British lovers are Roland (Jered McLenigan), a beekeeper, and Marianne (Sarah Gliko, McLenigan's real-life wife), a physicist who loves honey and speculates about "an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes." Their professions and core identities don't change – but everything else is up for grabs.
Matt Saunders' minimalistic set, Masha Tsimring's spare lighting, and Elizabeth Atkinson's sound design underline the play's abstraction. On a bare circular platform, against the backdrop of a gray curve suggestive of a broken orbit or planetary ring, Marianne and Roland engage in repeated overlapping, mutating exchanges that define alternative futures. A sudden dip in lighting and a crisp click – like the remote changing of a television channel – signal the start of each new scene, each fragmentary new existence. This video gives a good taste:
The conceit of the play is reminiscent of both the recent Broadway musical If/Then, in which a single, seemingly trivial choice created two different life trajectories, and Michael Frayn's brilliant Copenhagen, which used Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a metaphor for the slippery subjectivity of memory and history.
Describing the sources of Constellations, the Wilma's dramaturge, Walter Bilderback, quotes Jorge Luis Borges' musings on the philosophical possibility of "a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times" and Einstein's declaration that "the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Bilderback likens Constellations to a musical piece, with a theme and variations.
The romance between Roland and Marianne almost never gets off the ground. They meet cute, more or less, at a friend's barbecue, but in some versions of his life, Roland is already married, and their story ends. Once they hook up, the relationship hits a familiar array of snags: his cheating, her cheating, a botched or rejected marriage proposal, and, finally, her incapacitating illness – perhaps fatal, perhaps not. One click – and the plot thickens, or changes entirely.
Of the pair, McLenigan is the more technically adept, segueing seamlessly into different narratives, sometimes with the barest change of expression. Gliko struggles at first with her British accent. But she energizes a comically unintelligible sign-language scene, and her performance deepens as her circumstances grow dire. The ending is lovely, magical – a dance that whirls us back to the center of the story.
Constellations is smart, intriguing, idea-rich theater – but not for everyone. For all its stylishness, at times this 70-minute, intermissionless play can seem surprisingly long.