My enthusiasm for Jake Gyllenhaal‘s grinning, bug-eyed, Oscar-contending performance in Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler led me to fork over $140 for a ticket to Nick Payne‘s much-hailed Constellations, a two-hander in which Jake costars with The Affair‘s Ruth Wilson. It’s a short (70 minutes), head-trippy play about love and physics and endless parallel storylines co-existing in a shifty-eyed universe. And about Jake doing a deliciously spot-on British accent (a friend describes his patois as that of a “British Rastawannabe”) as a bee-keeper named Roland, and the British-born Wilson delivering a kind of sad and vibrant and open to all things routine, even in the face of death.
As Wilson’s Marianne, a Cambridge-based physicist, explains, “In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you’ve ever made and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.” Which is a smarty-pants way of saying that relationships can go any which way depending on any number of variables, and that however you slice it we’re all getting knocked around by random chance.
A New Yorker review of a 2012 London production with Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins described it as “a singular astonishment, at once eloquent and mysterious but which nonetheless articulates within its own idiosyncratic idiom something that touches an audience as real.” It also said it was on the pathfinding level of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Heathcote Williams‘ AC/DC and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw.
