The production won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play after debuting in London, and shortly after a Tony nomination upon its Broadway transfer, and so any theatre buff worth their salt will know of Constellations. Perhaps they’ve even had the pleasure of witnessing it live.
And yet even the most seasoned of spectators won’t have had the chance to see the Nick Payne play performed by local talent, at least not until now.
Next month, through the help of a grant from the Fund for the Artists of the North Shore, North Vancouver born and raised actress Gillian Clare will be among those bringing the two-person production to Vancouver.
Constellations, set to run on the Studio 16 stage in South Granville Feb. 14-25, had been “at the top of the play bucket list” for Clare for years, she said.
“It’s been on my radar for quite a while now. And so when our director, Christiana Ripeanu, reached out to me and said she wanted to work together, I suggested this play immediately.”
Clare said the two were particularly drawn to the entertainment value of the production. The script is “really, really funny,” the plot is “especially moving” and the characters are “impossible not to fall in love with," she said.
While the two-actor play follows the budding romance of two young lovers, Cambridge University astrophysicist Marianne and beekeeper Roland, there’s more to Constellations than unlikely romance. British playwright Payne takes the traditional boy-meet-girl tale and flips it on its head by plunging both characters into the multiverse, where their love story is played out in all its variations.
Clare will be joining an impressive roster of actresses to have taken on the role of Marianne, including Sally Hawkins, who led the play’s premier at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2012, and Ruth Wilson, who performed alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in its Broadway debut in 2015.
She said she thinks it’s going to be one of the most challenging roles she has ever taken on. With Payne not revealing much of the characters’ backstory in the script, she’ll have to bring more of herself to Marianne, something which requires a lot of “openness and vulnerability” to do correctly, she said.
“We’re creating this chemistry, this relationship, without the sort of textual details that you would get in a lot of other places. It’s an emotional challenge.”
As for the audience, Clare said she hopes viewers depart Studio 16 moved by the storyline and with thoughts to ponder on the way home.
“What this play is really about is making choices and deciding who you want to spend your life with, and I really hope that speaks to them in some way," she said.
Mina Kerr-Lazenby is the North Shore News’ Indigenous and civic affairs reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
