Constellations
by Nick Payne

Name: Constellations
Brand: Nick Payne
SKU: 9780571301966
Rating: 4.07 (2082 reviews)

BroadwayWest End

Constellations Book Cover — Constellations Cover

Highlights

Small Cast

Female

Male

One Act90 minsPresent DayStrong Role for Leading Man (Star Vehicle)Strong Role for Leading Woman (Star Vehicle)Bare Stage/Simple SetContemporary Costumes/Street ClothesBritish

Awards & Recognition

Evening Standard AwardOlivier Award

Winner! 2012 Evening Standard Award for Best New Play Nominee: Four 2013 Olivier Awards, including Best New Play Winner! Two 2022 Olivier Awards, including Best Revival

What readers are saying

Readers appreciate the thought-provoking concept and clever writing in Constellations, highlighting its exploration of love across parallel universes. Many note that while the text is intriguing, the experience of seeing it performed live greatly enhances the understanding and emotional impact of the play. Some find the structure challenging in written form but celebrate its depth and potential for live theatre.

Intriguing exploration of multiverse conceptBeautifully written and cleverWitty and thought-provokingStriking emotional depthMay be difficult to follow in reading form

Synopsis

THE STORY: This spellbinding, romantic journey begins with a simple encounter between a man and a woman.

But what happens next defies the boundaries of the world we think we know—delving into the infinite possibilities of their relationship and raising questions about the difference between choice and destiny.

Press Reviews

"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