Friday night, I had the delightful experience of seeing Constellations, a fantastic stage play written by Nick Payne and performed at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts.
Constellations is a romantic drama with a blending of physics and beekeeping. The play illustrates string theory and the idea that every decision we make spins off alternative universes. The characters relive moments multiple times, a scene repeating again and again each time a little bit (or sometimes drastically) different than the one before. Other scenes jump forward and then back in time, moments unstuck that only make sense when all is finished. As the play goes on, we get to see every possible side of these two characters and their relationship, the good and the bad, the moments that go horribly wrong and those that go impossibly right. This nonlinear presentation of the story provides an emotional depth. The play is
The staging is kept simple, with just a few low tables or stands that the actors can move around the stage to set up a different scene or location. The back ground is a network of interconnected lights, which change along with each scene in a new configuration, like varying constellations. The lights also look like neurons in brain, the interconnections of the mind.
With the background kept minimal, the focus, then, is on the performances of the actors — who have to bring fresh emotion and perspective to dialog they have to repeat two, three, or more times as each scene repeats. Robert Gilbert and Carie Kawa achieve this with phenomenal skill, making the leap from scene to scene almost look effortless.
I loved every second of this play. Unfortunately, this weekend was the last of its run, but if this gets put on my a theater company in your local area, I highly recommend going to see it.
Just for kicks, here’s the local trailer:
As a member of the Zoetic press team, I’m stoked to note that 
Of all the numerous King classics I’ve read, the book I held with most love in my memory was The Gunslinger, the first book in The Dark Tower series. I remember being hooked immediately by the opening sentence, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” It seemed at the time the perfect opening sentence, setting the main characters into place upon the stage and presenting an immediate mystery as the reader wonders, Why? In fact, I loved that opening sentence so much, I memorized it and the line has often come to mind at random moments over the years.