After a traditional cute meet, a man and woman begin, through stops and starts, to relate to each other nontraditionally in parallel worlds in a universe that accommodates different times, places, motivations, actions and reactions. A dark blue background holds stars. Lights flicker or flash to sounds, designating each variation of the same humans’ relationship. According to string theory, an infinite number of these could take place. Chris Tipp’s usually nice-guy Roland is a beekeeper. Alexis Hyatt works at Cambridge U. in the astrophysics department. They freely choose to go through different paths, single and married and as partners, cheating on and faithful to each other, in physical sickness and health, causing and suffering mental disturbances and being helpers to stave off their causes or effects. There’s only one consistency in Tipp’s and Alexis’s performance: it is top-notch acting. Luckily, they have effective coaches to help them speak with the right accents and keep aware of changes in who and where they are. Director Jason Cannon guides all with a sure hand and, as usual, sees to it that they come over as human as the play allows, not just experiments by author Nick Payne. What Payne has done is make a drama out of actors’ exercises, some of which consist of playing games with rules from science. His writing is expressive, but much of its effectiveness relies on actors and directors able to ferret out subtextual power too. Back in the 1960s, Megan Terry, working with the Open Theater, used actor training in character creation. (She became a formidable feminist playwright, even famous for perhaps putting together the first popular rock musical, Viet Rock, with its anti-war stance.) Terry created what she called a Transformation Technique, using improvisation during which—at one word or stance of an actor in a scene—she would signal a change. Each signal led the scene’s actors to “transform” into different characters or situations. Terry wrote down and edited and sometimes added to the scenes of Transformation as building blocks of her plays. She considered each of her plays as a continuing project to have actors create an audience experience. The stage would transform into a universe that might present an endless drama into the audience’s consciousness. This transcendent experience could indeed be sectioned off into a progression of characterizations and ideas that constitute drama. Terry didn’t know beans about astrophysics or theories of everything, but her use of Transformation Technique during actors’ exercises to create characters and drama got results like Nick Payne’s. The difference is that he wrote his plays’ dialogue, seemingly supplying it to actors, not using any of theirs. He also explored scientific theories, particularly string theory, to use. Terry, on the other hand, let her techniques result in characters audiences could care about in an understandable situation (people forced into a terrible war, for instance, or the use of TV panels for destructive propaganda, or the mistreatment and lack of medical treatment of women in prison). Like Brecht, she hoped audiences could empathize and perhaps take action about such important issues. With Nick Payne and Constellations, the emphasis is on two people interacting over time and space. All the audience can do about them or characters like them is be interested or not. The play may be an impetus toward learning about string theory. But then, that may soon be old hat, because the latest prominence in the technological world, I’m told, is more of a Megan Terry kind of thing: Transformation Technology.
