Constellations

It’s a rare delight to attend a play whose performance is as convincing as that by Jenkins and Lexi Sekuless in Constellations.  The mental agility necessary to convey the varying significance in consecutively played word-identical scenes several times in a row and in many alternatives to the one scene with little to no break between them was impressive; the memory necessary to replay all the variations one after another must be prodigious.  And this cast of two pulled it off without the slightest hitch, with acting that was natural, clear, and at times moving.

Caroline Stacey’s directorial skill is evident in the ease with which Jenkins and Sekuless used the play’s spartan set — whose design (by Imogen Keen) reflected both regularity and randomness and whose colourfulness was interestingly often hidden by clever lighting design — to support their emotional interactions without apparent conscious effort, and in their every gesture and line being as you and I might produce them in full unselfconsciousness.

Repetition of the play’s three or four scenes an average of ten or twelve times could grow stale if not handled well.  In fact, the playwright may have missed an opportunity or two to create a single story line arising from the dependency itself — showing rather than mentioning the fall of a coin, the toss of a die, or the wafting of something into an eye and what followed from it — with increasingly divergent dialogues in instances of the one scene commencing from the same start showing us what the play instead told us.  Yet even consecutive scenes of identical dialogue remained fresh in their varying significance in the hands of these consummate actors, who conveyed with utter genuineness their various feelings and relationships with each other: of comfort with each other, of self-conscious awkwardness, of woundedness, of the spontaneous joy of reunion, of urgency, and of acceptance.

Whilst the script itself may not have fully explored the potential to do something utterly transformative with the concept it explores, this production is a beautiful example of visionary integration of stage design, lighting, a supportive but unobtrusive soundtrack, and wonderful direction in support of consummate performance arising from an exciting idea.  You’ll find it an interesting eighty minutes.

John P. Harvey

Image: [L–R] Kristian Jenkins and Lexi Sekuless, in Constellations.  Picture: Novel Photographic.