This month, Street Corner Arts is presenting Constellations, the award-winning play by Nick Payne. It's a love story, featuring only two characters, but with an important twist: we see dozens of alternate universe versions of these characters, playing out their relationship in myriad possible ways.
"The playwright assumes that... multiverses are real, so what he's done is take these pivotal moments in these two character's lives and allow us to see different variations on that moment," says director Liz Fisher. "Sometimes they get together, sometimes they don't, sometimes things are going great, sometimes things go poorly."
"It's kind of about how these two people come together in different ways, under different circumstances in each of the universes," says Stephanie Carll, who plays Marianne, a theoretical physicist. "There's a lot of quantum physics in this play."
Playing over forty versions of the same characters in an eighty minute play presents unique challenges for the actors. "The technical stuff that you have to do, it's about your given circumstances in each universe," says Ryan Hamilton, who plays beekeeper Roland. "So...you have to make it so that you can go from universe to universe and change those given circumstances on a dime. So that's the real challenge."
Fisher is very happy to get the chance to direct Constellations. "The first time I read it, I knew I had to find a way to make it work, because I absolutely fell in love with the story," she says. "It's not a big, flashy, in-your-face kind of play. It's this very sort of simple, quiet, almost sigh of a play that has these incredible depths."
Constellations runs through December 17 at Hyde Park Theatre.
