Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Boy meets girl again. Girl meets boy again. And on and on. Playwright Nick Payne has set "Constellations" in a multiverse where Marianne and Roland act out the infinite possibilities of relationships. Should he stay or should he go? May I have this dance, or not?
Jungle Theater opened this crisp and modest two-hander last weekend, with Gary Gisselman directing Anna Sundberg and Ron Menzel as the cosmic couple who meet at a party, fumble through infatuation, heartbreak and happiness and end up in a spatial way station where time stands still.
Sundberg and Menzel greet us, appearing to be interstellar explorers, a bit duffed by Kate Sutton-Johnson's astral-glam set of silvery ribbons stretched across the multi-platformed stage. Barry Browning's lights provide the flashing stars on these ribbons and C. Andrew Mayer's sound design drifts out of the galaxy.
Gisselman has calibrated this entrance to convey an air of freshness and timeless new creation.
Onto this tabula rasa, Sundberg's Marianne and Menzel's Roland get quickly into the mundane grit that drives human relationships. She puzzles him with a proposition: We cannot lick our elbow tips because if we could, we might be able to live forever. And we couldn't have that, could we?
This little scene at a backyard barbecue is then played over again and again and again — as are most of the scenes in Payne's script.
In terrestrial terms, Roland is a beekeeper and Marianne is an academic who studies quantum mechanics and cosmology. Their occupations barely matter in one sense, and matter greatly in another. Roland, proposing marriage, recites the strict purpose and confined roles of three classes of bees — worker, drone and queen. He then announces his "unfailing clarity of purpose" in asking Marianne to join him in a definitive relationship.
Marianne, in facing her own challenges, waxes on about parallel universes and the mutability of time. We all want to have as much time as possible on this planet but how do we value or quantify our understanding of time? What space does it occupy?
Payne's script mines a familiar meme: the permeability of parallel universes. He also has created something that can come perilously close to an acting exercise, with the scenes played over and over. Gisselman's production, though, elevates itself above that fate by managing to get us to invest in people who seem real chunks of flesh, not ciphers.
Sundberg's performance is the more relaxed and emotionally supple. Her Marianne bears the existential weight of time and chance with greater depth of understanding. Menzel, a nervy and intense actor, can get a little mannered as the higher-strung, flinching Roland. (Is it all those bee stings?)
At its best, "Constellations" will have you wondering for days, "What if? What if?" The possibilities are endless.
graydon.royce@startribune.com • 612-673-7299 • Twitter: @graydonroyce
