Constellations

“This exceptional new romantic drama packs more into an hour or so than most manage in three.” – The Telegraph

“Who knew that higher physics could be so sexy, so accessible – and so emotionally devastating? Constellations, Nick Payne’s gorgeous two-character drama… may be the most sophisticated date play Broadway has seen. [Payne is] a wise and compassionate young playwright… And though Constellations is a supremely articulate play, it knows that words inevitably fail, that they are never enough to bind two people together forever. Time, it turns out, is a more effective breaker of hearts than human beings, with all their conflicted intentions, can ever be. This story of parallel universes is universal in every sense of the word.”  – The New York Times

“Nick Payne’s smart, slushy and pretty superb Constellations [is] about the progress of any ordinary life, which begins with seemingly endless possibilities and then dwindles until death forecloses further choice… I wasn’t alone in sniffling into my Playbill.” – The Guardian

“Short and sweet and strangely haunting… the devilishly clever scribe is not playing games with either his characters or his audience, because with each iteration Roland and Marianne grow closer to one another – and become more important to us. And by the end of the play (has it really been only an hour?), we’re fully invested in their lives. All of them.” – Variety

“A singular astonishment, at once eloquent and mysterious but which nonetheless articulates within its own idiosyncratic idiom something that touches an audience as real… a wholly satisfying and complete emotional journey… The well-judged dialogue, at once terse and trenchant, finds its own characteristic poetry.” – The New Yorker

ON BREAKING CHARACTER
Playwright Interview: Nick Payne
by Cathy Thomas
13 August 2019