Greta Honold: Can you tell us a bit about Nick Payne and the idea for this play?
Jonathan Berry: Nick starts with an idea, a point of interest for him, and then he does a lot of detailed research into that particular industry. In the case of Constellations
he was initially excited about the idea of colony collapse so he studied the bee world and got really deep into it before realizing that writing a play about bees was going to be very hard. Just when he was mentally turning that page over he saw the documentary The Elegant Universe which talks about the possible solutions to the problematic relationship between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, and then that became the new jumping off point.
GH: Can you give us a short science lesson?
JB: Oh boy. Nick does such a good job of that in the play but... I’ll give it a shot. Einstein’s theory of relativity is all about gravitational pull. Quantum mechanics is about the way the interior of an atom behaves. Both are universal principles that explain everything except each other. So you can explain the perceptible universe through the theory of relativity and yet relativity has absolutely no bearing on what happens within the nucleus of an atom. The nucleus of an atom has a completely different set of rules, explained by quantum mechanics. Scientists are eager to come up with a theory that allows these two competing theories to exist in the same world because currently we have a universe that requires two different sets of rules that shouldn’t exist together.
Nick’s written a really extraordinary relationship play under the umbrella of these big universal scientific ideas. In the end, he wrote this play about two people— a beekeeper, Roland, and a cosmologist, Marianne, whose particular point of expertise is the multiverse, which is one way of explaining how relativity and quantum mechanics might coexist. What Nick Payne did was write about how hard it can be for two people to come together in the world.
GH: Can you talk a bit about the form this play takes?
JB: There are seven different points of time where we see Roland and Marianne. We see their initial meeting, what could potentially be one of their last conversations and then five different points in between. At each of these points in time we see five to seven different variations on how that scene could go. Sometimes Nick changes two words, sometimes ten sentences, sometimes it’s the same starting point and he takes it o in a totally different direction. The point being that he is creating these multiple universes. So the challenge and excitement for the actors is you really get to recreate, in every iteration, new variations on the characters.
GH: It seems as if this human exercise of imagining all the different ways your life might go is a very natural one and one a lot of plays and movies and books have explored over the years.
JB: If you are a person who has a conversation and walks away and thinks of all the different ways you could have had that conversation... I mean it is very human to reflect on your life and then imagine it differently. For me, the question the play is wrestling with is, in that moment, why do we make the choices we do? One of the problems of the multiverse is—if there are multiple versions of you making every possible decision, eventually, what’s the point of making any decision? What is the point of getting up in the morning and doing anything? I think Nick’s answer to that is that the ability to choose makes us human. And that specific choice, that decision to engage, makes the difference in who we are and how we live. We are choosing the story that we’re telling. They don’t actually talk about constellations in the play. For me the through line of that—the idea of the play—is that at some point thousands of years ago someone looked up and saw an infinitesimal number of stars and to make sense of that they started drawing lines and making recognizable shapes as a way of helping us feel connected to something bigger to help us understand something that’s impossible to understand. Which is both the universe and relationships.
GH: You can look at it from a really optimistic perspective, like that notion can be very freeing, or it can be really terrifying and constricting, the sense that my actions have no real consequence.
JB: Yes—either your actions matter too much or not at all! Where is the middle ground? For me it comes down to your relationship with responsibility. Either we recognize that the place where we’re at is because of the choices that we’ve made or we wait for something to happen TO us to maintain, somehow, plausible deniability. And on any given day, I am capable of either of those behaviors.
Some people see this story as an epic romance, that “these two people are fated to come together despite all these odds.” I prefer to think that we always have the ability to choose to be together and for all different reasons we sometimes fuck that up. It’s not dependent on fate, it’s on us to be brave and risk it. You get to have a say in the story of your life and that choice to open up and be vulnerable to another person is, ultimately, the thing that makes us human.