New York Review: Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental’s Nick Payne’s “Constellations” presented by The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival and La MaMa
Natalie Rine, Associate New York Critic
A quiet revolution happened this past month at The Public Theater’s annual Under the Radar Festival. Swooping in eponymously, well, “under the radar,” was Beijing-based Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental’s ground-breaking performance of Nick Payne’s “Constellations.” Here, stripped of the fanfare of a Broadway all-star cast, New York audiences are instead assaulted with the tragedy and melody of Payne’s two-hander writing about quantum multiverse theory, love, and fate—but this time all told in Mandarin Chinese and set within a large circular platform, bare besides surround-stage cameras and one hamster in a wheel incessantly running.
As someone who travels to Asia and around the world to see theater in various languages, I cannot say the language barrier put me off for even a heart-pounding, riveting second of the piece. Directed with poignant elegance by Wang Chong, this “Constellations” gradually decenters language in a way that complicates the traditional director’s impetus to be a universal representation of a playwright’s work. Whereas traditional take on this difficult-to-swallow play anchor themselves in the universality and humanity of a love story, Wang Chong revels in the complicated nature of the themes of multiverse theory itself, choosing love as a backseat to voyeurism and the omniscience of controlling the story “from the outside;” it is this conflict of power dynamics that transfers to the audience, electrifying the piece in a brand new way. Here, it’s the staging that overpowers the textual and auditory, existing in that linguistic liminality where (as anyone bilingual can attest) one can process events in multiple terminologies simultaneously to grasp meaning in one fluid instant.
In the case of this production, that instant happens as we watch the two actors in front of us fumble, flirt, fight and forgive, yet we also see on a big screen overhead what is being filmed by whichever of the two dozen cameras is on for that scene (along with supertitles in English). The addition of the cameras and film work create a new dual identity for our two characters, as they perform now on stage and on screen, battling for their love and lives as they (or, more accurately, us—since they are just living unaware of the multiplicity of scenes) struggle to know which timeline is “real.” This double consciousness structures the audience’s experiences and identity in ways that differ from the experiences of most audiences.
Unlike traditional plays, here we have two characters under constant surveillance, experiencing the brute forces of what we conjecture is an omniscient sense of Time controlling them, paired also with the traditional spectatorship of the live theater, yet doubled by the presence of the filming. Questions about who is watching who arise, as sometimes one actor stands alone, or we can barely see them in the camera frame, or their backs are turned to us in real life; the permutations are seemingly as endless as the parallel universes described, as the play spirals toward the seemingly inevitable tragedy regardless of what angle we see things. To some degree, the dual nature of the viewing space empties the theatricality of its traditional emancipatory content; we don’t feel good and safe in our audience seats, we squirm and gasp and wait for each new angle of the camera and story to appear. As a containment strategy, the fourth wall has expanded to now surround the actors through film, with only some of the final moments occurring off the center clock-shaped platform and on the same ground level as the audience. This serves to politicize the characters’ entrapment, such that insurgency under an omniscient gaze is impossible until (spoiler) death is at their door.
Payne’s terse dialogue, repetitious as his characters live out different versions of the same given circumstances multiple times over, become eerily poetic as you get into the flow of accepting the scene shifts as universe shifts. Once the characters explain the multiverse theory, we understand the game we’re seeing unravel before us. Or, at least, we think we do. Payne’s mind-bending explosion of a play has been compared to being of a “digital age speed,” but, as a millennial, I find that off-mark and patronizing to an intelligent modern audience. What that glosses over is the emphasis this iteration extracts from Payne’s text onto the character played by Wang Xiaohuan of cosmologist Liu Mei (originally Marianne). The plot has her cross paths with professional beekeeper Du Lei (originally Roland), where they strike up a conversation, become acquainted, fall in love and then split up. Except, following the belief that there are multiple universes that pull people's lives in various directions, the play's structure of brief scenes repeated with different outcomes, paired with Wang Chong’s searing camera direction, emphasizes Liu Mei as the victim of relived trauma. Whereas the play has been called “romantic” and “spellbinding” in other productions, I don’t want to romanticize the pain and trauma of this agonizing iteration. Maybe when it’s a white woman’s pain we think it’s romantic to watch the suffering. But here, surrounded by cameras, we are overtly aware of the immovable presence and passage of time, and we shatter in a million pieces knowing she never had a shot at another ending.
Because of this pressure cooker environment built around Liu Mei, Payne’s text takes on a potentially new guise of feminist multilayered and incessant thoughts reminiscent of Rita Felski’s seminal “Telling Time in Feminist Theory.” In it, Felski maps out four basic modes of feminist temporality that shape and circumscribe feminist thought: time as redemption, as regression, as repetition, and as rupture. The essay argues that time knits together the subjective and the social, the personal and the public; we forge links between our own lifetime and the larger historical patterns that transcend us, just as Liu Mei is trying to come to terms with her own belief in this, in being just a puzzle piece while also balancing her personal will. With this dizzying multiplicity, woman, in this case, exemplified as Liu Mei, fluctuates bearing the brunt of time’s meaning. As Felski describes, “She stands for the behind and beyond, for the sublime mystery of temporal otherness; she is the token of a far-distant past as well as a future that exceeds our grasp.” Wang Chong’s production does not resolve this ambiguity, but rather intensifies it to astounding effect.
Wang Chong and his Beijing Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental’s “Constellations” captures an incendiary brew of time, space, and theatricality, elevating the play to an experiential entrapment of epic, episodic proportions—the likes of which go unrivaled around the world.
Nick Payne’s “Constellations”
Co-Presented by The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival and La MaMa. Written by Nick Payne; Directed by Wang Chong; Performed by Wang Xiaohuan and Li Jialong; Music: Li Yangfan; Set Design: Ji Linlin and Di Tianyi; Light: Meng Lingyang; Assistant directors: Yang Fan and Dizi; Producers: Wang Chong, Wang Qingyang, and Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental; Co-producers: Sun Kehuang and Mu Ge
“Constellations” ran as part of The Public’s Under the Radar Festival at LaMaMa (66 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003) until January 12. Performed in Mandarin Chinese with supertitles in English. Run Time: 1 hour and 30 minutes. For more information, please visit: https://publictheater.org/productions/season/1920/utr/constellations/
Photo: A scene from Nick Payne’s Constellations, running January 9-12 at La MaMa as part of The Public’s 16th Annual Under the Radar Festival. Photo Credit: Yang Yang