QUANTUM DRAMA
Shadow explores the multiverse
The wise and Pulitzer Prize winning author, Carol Shields, while dying of breast cancer, once said that life provides plenty of time to do the things we need to do. Whether that’s true or not ricocheted through my mind throughout the production of Constellations, the Nick Payne two-hander that opened Thursday at the Varscona.
Under the direction of Shadow Theatre’s Amy DeFelice, the play, set in Britain, begins at a barbecue, where Roland (Mat Busby) and Marianne (Liana Shannon) meet and banter in a way that might suggest flirtation. Except that Roland is married. Or perhaps he’s just out of a serious relationship, or maybe he’s single. Indeed, he appears to be all of those things, all at the same time, but in different dimensions of time and space.
That’s the premise of the oneact play, an absorbing 75 minutes that manages to get the audience to buy into a “quantum multiverse” where, as Marianne (a scholar of quantum cosmology) explains, “every choice, every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.”
“This is genuinely turning me on,” quips Roland, a shy beekeeper who knows very well that he’s punching well above his weight, but brings his heart and soul to the effort.
Here we see the relationship stick, as Roland goes on bended knee to propose to Marianne, who happily accepts. There, we see her reply to his proposal by saying “Roland, we talked about this.” One scene has the couple playing out their dialogue in sign language (which is not in the original play), a gesture appreciated by at least one audience member, who quietly and briefly applauded at the scene’s end.
Constellations exists as a kind of Groundhog Day for geniuses, a Sliding Doors with many entrances and exits. The script feels like a loop, with identical portions of interplay between the two characters, sometimes changing only by a word or phrase, but leading to dramatically different outcomes. At one point, Marianne has an affair, at another, it’s Roland who strays.
The scenes are played out on a simple stage by Tessa Stamp that’s designed to represent a blackboard, littered with equations and other chalky scrawls, and dotted with cylinders and benches where Busby and Shannon perch. The actors’ bodies bend or straighten slightly, accompanied by space-age sound effects, to signal a move between the multiverses.
It’s great intellectual, and romantic, sport to imagine living in concurrent universes, and to construct our own “what if ” scenarios. But early in the play, there is an event that shifts the romcom perspective into something more poignant. Marianne is diagnosed with a brain tumour, and suddenly there is the question of what happens when atoms quit bouncing up against each other. Our intellect can take us many places, the body ... not so much.
This is a stellar piece of writing, and performances of the play in cities from London to Los Angeles to New York have received critical acclaim. Edmonton’s own Busby and Shannon are very good in their respective roles. We feel their characters move closer to each other, spiritually and physically, while the tumour swells and recedes. Perhaps it is benign. Or maybe not.
As Roland struggles to come to grips with a potential loss, Marianne does her best to comfort him.
“We have all the time we’ve always had,” she says. “There’s not going to be any more or less of it when I am gone.”
In the same way that Shields had all the time in the world until she didn’t, love may be elastic until it snaps.
This play, these words, fill us with hope, which in the end, is its own thing. Hope is meant to be passed hand-to-hand, life-to-life, universe-to-universe, doors opening even as they close.