What if you could go back in time and make a different choice about who you spend your life with and how you honor that relationship?
It’s impossible, of course, except in the Marvel multiverse where superheroes live parallel lives in alternate timelines or in Nick Payne’s intricate 2012 play “Constellations,” which opened Saturday in a stellar new production at Liberty Station.
“Constellations” marks the second production by Chalk Circle Collective, a daring, peripatetic theater company that debuted last fall with a thrilling staging of “The Turn of the Screw.” “Constellations” is equally impressive in its acting, direction and design. At the mesmerizing performance I attended, the audience was so rapt by the show you could’ve heard a pin drop.
Chalk Circle cofounder Megan Carmitchel co-stars in the production with San Diego newcomer Nick Apostolina, who made his local debut in June as the sinister Mordred in North Coast Rep’s “Camelot.” They play Marianne and Roland, an English couple who meet at a bar and fall in love. Or maybe they don’t.
Payne structured the 70-minute play as a series of 50 short scenes, which each kick off with subtle bursts of light by designer Annelise Salazar and vacuum-like puffs of sound by designer Steven Leffue. The scenes frequently repeat themselves, but with different dialogue and slight to wildly different outcomes.
Marianne is a brilliant cosmologist obsessed with the endless possibilities in the string, particle and cluster theories of the universe. But as her life spins out of control, she becomes desperate to control her own trajectory. Roland is an urban beekeeper with a gentle, go-with-the-flow personality. They get engaged, or they break up. She cheats on him, or vice versa. She’s diagnosed with a serious illness, or she’s not. Like the movie “Sliding Doors,” the play looks at how the subtlest choices we make can have profound impacts on our relationships and lives.
This is the third time “Constellations” has been presented in San Diego (the first was in 2016 at the Old Globe), and it’s by far the best. The play is imaginatively staged by director Hannah Meade on scenic designer Reiko Huffman’s raised round platform stage surrounded by banks of lights, like an isolated planet. Meade’s minimalist staging pulls the audience’s focus in on the actors and their characters’ many shape-shifting relationships.
Carmitchel and Apostolina have great chemistry and are both superb in the roles of Marianne and Roland, which require a great amount of acting range.
Apostolina brings a gentle sweetness and sensitivity to the somewhat awkward Roland, as well as an excellent English accent that subtly shifts from posh to working class whenever he’s drinking. And Carmitchel is a stage chameleon, switching on a dime from dignified academic to goofy flirt to tortured soul.
This beautifully staged play is engaging, funny, sweet, fascinating and haunting, and it’s another home run for Chalk Circle.
‘Constellations’
When: 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Sept. 29
Where: Chalk Circle Collective at Light Box Theatre, 2590 Truxtun Road, Suite 205, Liberty Station, Point Loma
Tickets: $35
Online: chalkcirclecollective.com