I just got home from watching the Heart Repertory Theatre's performance of "Constellations" by Nick…read morePayne.
The actors did a great job.
I was riveted.
I found this particular play to be unique, poignant, and thought-provoking.
The play explores many different possibilities within one romantic relationship and the lives of the two individuals in that relationship. If small changes were to happen along the course of a romantic relationship, they could lead to very different conversations, happenings, and results. Fascinating. He thought I would be interested in this topic, he found this play for us to see today as part of a week long spoiling me for Valentine's Day (A HEART Repertory Theatre performance to celebrate Valentine's Day... how sweet!), and he was right.
This play explores concepts that cut to the core of our humanity: illness, death, thoughts about dying, love, betrayal, and more. In my personal opinion, compelling theater (and compelling opera, and, much more broadly, compelling art in general) often does this.
The Sammamish Valley Grange 286 building, where the play was performed, was a smallish, intimate venue. I was able to vividly see the actors' facial expressions, and I was able to perfectly hear the actors' changing tones of voice in the various scenes. This significantly added to my enjoyment of the performance.
I once had someone ask me what I think about how much control we (as humans) have over our own lives. One of my long-time friends thinks that we have complete control over everything that happens to us in our lives, that we planned it all and agreed to it all before our spirits came to the earthly plane. Other friends of mine strongly believe in fate, luck, and chance.
My own view is that our lives are a dynamic interplay between fate and personal choice, and at every moment, this interplay is composed a little differently. Perhaps in one exact moment I have no control over what is about to happen, or very little control, because it was destined for me. Perhaps in another moment I have quite a lot of control, and the choices that I decide to make will heavily influence the outcome of the situation.
I have always been enamored of the physics concept of time as non-linear ( a concept that is essential to this play), and I have also always been enamored of thoughts about different possibilities that could occur within the same life if small (or large) changes are made. My ex-boyfriend (many years ago) was (still is, I think) a Professor of Astrophysics. Yep - an actual Rocket Scientist. I could've listened to him talk all day about his work, which worked well for us, since he loved to talk. Ha. Also, when I was a kid in the 1990s, I wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure Book. It was hundreds of pages long. The only people who ever read it were my close friends (they were fans). I thought that the hard copy Choose Your Own Adventure Books (the internet was in its infancy back then) were mostly geared towards boys (cars, weapons, etc, which were boy things back then) and also that there just weren't enough choices for the reader to make (or roads for the reader to take) in those books. So I wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure book starring a girl main character. My book was hundreds of pages long, so that the reader had choices galore. My main character had adventures that interested me and that interested some of my friends who were also girls. I named my main character Camintha. Even as a kid, I was fascinated by the concept that different choices that we make may (and often do) lead to vastly different outcomes, both for our lives, and for the lives of others as well.
This play reminded me of what it means to be a thinking, questioning, curious human, who has choices to make that may be influential to ourselves, our loved ones, and occasionally even larger groups of humans as well.
I loved this performance.
We caught one of the earlier performances of this play by this Theatre Company. There are still tickets on sale for later performances of this play on the Heart Repertory Theatre's website.
Many Theaters and Actors, Directors, Set Designers, Lighting Specialists, Playwrights, and everyone else who works in Theatre, took a hit during the pandemic, of course, as did many arts communities.
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