Starry, starry night
Constellations at Adobe Rose Theatre
Your name is Marianne and you meet a man. Or, your name is Roland and you meet a woman. You start dating each other, or you start dating other people. You are at a barbecue and it is not raining and you went to college with the host, or it is raining and you’re not sure whose party it is. In ,a play by Nick Payne, all of these scenarios and many more exist at once. Just Say It Theater presents the play, directed by Lynn Goodwin, at the Adobe Rose Theatre, continuing from Friday, March 16, through April 1.
In the beginning, seems like a vortex of confusion, with scenes and conversations between Marianne (played by Alexandra Renzo) and Roland (Scott Harrison) repeating with small variations — a word change or a slight difference in context. Roland is a beekeeper, the kind of man who prefers the reality of nature he can see and touch. Marianne is a theoretical physicist with an interest in ideas we cannot see that may or may not control the universe or multiverse — a hypothetical set of possible universes that encompass everything that exists. “I’ve been reading about how words are a very small part of the communication that we do between us as human beings, and the rest is gestures, intonation,” Goodwin said. “Nick Payne’s words are pretty straightforward, but built into them are just these slight shifts, which I think is the point of the play, which is about how many choices we have in life. There’s the question of how many choices we have for one reaction to an action. And if there are all these other choices that still exist, out there in the universe, where are they?”
might sound like esoteric experimental theater, but dramaturge Dale Dunn said it is not, because she thinks of experimental theater as much less formed than this play. was first performed at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2012; the Manhattan Theatre Club opened the play on Broadway in 2014. “The experiment here is in the way Payne tells the story, in the repetition and how the repetition gets rolling and rolling and rolling, and you suddenly realize how strong we are within ourselves and how the words that we say don’t always make much sense. There is a cumulative effect.” Dunn is the co-artistic director of Just Say It Theater, which she founded with Goodwin in 2014.
“Marianne is incredibly smart in every single version of herself,” Renzo said. “She’s sometimes really witty and funny, and sometimes not so witty and funny. Occasionally she’s very seductive and has a lot of power and is very grounded. Other times she’s swept up in theory and can be stuck in her head.”
“Roland is about what he can see and observe,” Harrison said. “He’s very thoughtful — by which I mean he has a generosity, but he also looks for patterns in relationships and wants to understand why