By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
“Constellations” starts with an observation I’d never considered before. Marianne asks Roland if he’d ever thought why “It’s impossible to lick the tip of your elbows.”
Marianne (Katya Dachik) and Roland (Mark T. Denucci, Jr.) are at a barbecue. They’ve never met before, and this is her awkward foray to break the ice, maybe even flirt with him.
The reason people can’t lick the tip of their elbows, she says, is that the tip of the elbow is the key to immortality, and if everyone lived forever, it would cause chaos.
He begs off the conversation. His wife is waiting for him. Or he’s recently broken off a long-time relationship. Or he’s unattached.
All these things are true, as the conversation is replayed with slight and not so slight variations.
We learn he is a beekeeper and she teaches physics at Cambridge University.
“Constellations” is a love story informed by quantum mechanics. The play by Nick Payne is being staged by TBD Productions in the atrium of the Bowling Green Veterans Building in City Park, Friday, Feb. 11, Saturday, Feb. 12, and Monday, Feb. 14 at 7:30 p.m.; and, Sunday Feb. 13 at 2:30 p.m. in the Veterans Memorial.
The one-act play, directed by Matt Zwyer, progresses through scenes that repeat with a series of variations.
Roland and Marianne arrive back at her apartment, she asks him to leave, he says he has to leave, they start making out… all equal possibilities in the multiverse. There is a narrative line, if anything in this play can be said to be linear, in which they stay together and encounter the struggles of love.
One scene, acted out at the table covered with bottles in the center of the atrium, appears once early on. Marianne is telling Roland he cannot continue to work, no, not even part-time. Why?
That’s where “Constellations” is headed.
All this plays out in the round with the audience seated in a single row of seats encircling the stage area. Blocks are set in various spots that serve as landing points for scenes. Dachik and Denucci move around the space – like constellations in the night sky.
The actors do shine. The script requires them to be the same characters, yet their moods flip in a wink. First their wary, then playful. Even harder, their moods shift ever so slightly from one scene variation to the other. Yet the core of their personalities, Roland, vacillating, yet seeking the stability of a beehive, and Marianne, consumed by the uncertainties of life and death as well as the rigors of physics, remain constant. They are always the same people, and their changing reactions are always true to their core.
It’s all a puzzle. But the play does coalesce into a multifaceted tale that tugs at the heart.
We hope for the best for Roland and Marianne, and maybe, in some version of their lives, that’s what they find.
