Production Notes

I’ve always loved Nick Payne’s complex yet elegant play about love in a quantum multiverse. Meanwhile, one of the challenges when directing students is finding texts that meet a handful of important criteria: they have to be accessible, they should say something about the possibilities of the theatrical form, and they need to work with large casts of differing genders, ages and ethnicities.

Constellations certainly ticks the first two and I had a feeling that, despite being written as a two-hander, it might work for the latter as well. Since the play visits the same two characters across different versions of reality, might not those different realities also allow the characters themselves to appear in different forms – as men and women, gay and straight, black and white, while sharing the same fundamental character at their core?

The production, which involved 19 student actors, became a fascinating exercise in character and theatricality, bringing the audience in on the concept with actors visibly lining up just off the stage to jump into the on-stage character like planes on a runway. For the student actors, the rehearsal process was a rich learning exercise in textual analysis where they were able to get deep inside the text and characterisation, with only two characters to study rather than stretching thin across a large and unwieldy dramatis-personae.

As the process went on, I also came to the pleasing realisation that – in our version of the play – this became a story about stories. I was struck by the idea that Payne’s love story was one that was simply bound to happen, across endless versions of reality and countless iterations of the characters. No matter who or where they were, this story was determined to unfold.