Time and Again
A man and a woman hold the stage for scarcely more than an hour in “Constellations,” a theatrical conjuring act that shoots across space in less time than it takes to wash and dry a load of laundry. But in that brief span, Roland (he’s a beekeeper) and Marianne (she’s a theoretical physicist) flirt and fight and love and mourn and play out enough variables of what can happen between a man and a woman to represent the infinity of possibilities that exists for each of us, at all times, if only we could stretch our understanding of life’s big picture. Or as Marianne says, in the crystalline words of British playwright Nick Payne, “In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.”
“Constellations” is about physics. It’s about love and loss and sex and ballroom dancing lessons, too, experienced by characters specific enough to come alive as individuals; at the end, we know these two. In addition, for anyone who likes to take art apart to see how it is built, the play is one striking solution to the eternal creative lure of folding time. On stage. In real theater minutes. Without the visual benefit of wipes, dissolves, parallel screens, jump cuts, voice-overs, musical cues, and funky editing tricks with which filmmakers love to mess up narrative. (Sometimes when they have nothing more substantial to say. But that’s a different essay.)
In real theater time, we travel from A to Z, from Scene One to Final Curtain, at the same pace as the actors on stage. That’s the human-scale, intimate power of live drama as well as its limitation, this shared ticking of the clock. Even in dramas of epic scale, when emperors are slain, democracies are born, or Mormons proselytize in Uganda, everyone in the theater, on both sides of the lights, breathes in the same measure of the moving minute hand. We do it naturally.
Which doesn’t keep playwrights from experimenting with dramaturgical origami, to striking effect. The treachery in “Betrayal,” Harold Pinter’s piercing 1978 drama of marital duplicity, gains power from the reverse chronology Pinter uses to tell the tale: The play begins at the end of an affair, and ends at the beginning, coloring our feelings about the excitement and passion of the new. Before Pinter, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart used a similar reverse structure to chart the lost ideals of in their 1934 play “Merrily We Roll Along,” later adapted by Stephen Sondheim (with the same architecture) as a musical in 1981.
Samuel Beckett famously lassoed time as a loop in “Waiting for Godot,” his 1953 masterpiece about existential folly: The shared human instincts of repetition and forgetfulness, and repetition and forgetfulness, aren’t so much ways to move forward as survival mechanisms for bearing the unbearable universal absurdity of persisting in one place.
Tom Stoppard set the past and the present side-by-side to gorgeous effect in “Arcadia,” his enthralling 1993 play about the very concept of time, set within a grand English country house in scenes that shift between the 19th and 20th centuries. The tour de force finale blends both centuries at the same time in a ravishing mélange of costumes and props.
“A Doll’s House Part 2” by Lucas Hnath, which just closed a fine run on Broadway, moves ahead in a linear fashion—but that fashion invents a leap forward of 15 years from the moment when Nora Helmer walked out on her husband, Torvald at the end of “A Doll’s House,” Henrik Ibsen’s forward-thinking domestic drama, written 120 years earlier.
Robert Frost wrote of the road not taken. The Firesign Theatre asked, “How Can You Be Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All.” Harold Ramis called it “Groundhog Day” in his glorious 1993 movie that came and went as a Broadway musical this year. The droll playwright David Ives claimed it was a matter of “All in the Timing” in the time-teasing comedic one-act plays-with-variations that launched his career in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Our human hunger to have it all/taste it all—FOMO/Fear of Missing Out and all that—can feel insatiable.
That’s where art comes in. And, at Tangent Theatre, “Constellations,” a concise play of such tenderness and agility that time simultaneously slows down and flies by to accommodate our marvel at one playwright’s skill.
Tangent presented CONSTELLATIONS Sept. 28 - Oct. 22
September 2017
