Summer Shorts: Series A

In Series A, the first part of Summer Shorts at 59E59, all three plays circle around death. This is a lot for a 90-minute evening.

The first show, Interior, is the most fully realized of the three. Two men stand outside a house, gathering their strength to give the people inside terrible news. Gracefully if somewhat repetitively written by Nick Payne, Interior is a sad and hard-hitting slice of life, well-acted by Bill Buell and Jordan Bellow.

Jordan Bellow, Bill Buell
Interior
Photo: Carol Rosegg

The Bridge Play by Danielle Trzcinski lives in the gray area between a skit and a play, with a simple plot: a man is getting ready to jump off a bridge and a younger man starts talking to him. The play moves along nicely and has some funny moments, but since we know that the guy isn't going to jump, the suspense is minimal. The play does offer two decent character studies, and James P. Rees and Christopher Dylan White are both quite good.

James P. Rees, Christopher Dylan White
The Bridge Play
Photo: Carol Rosegg

Here I Lie consists of two interlocking monologues that don't interlock; they just kind of interrupt each other. The characters are a young women and man (Libe Barer and Robbie Tann, both excellent) with difficult problems that aren't quite what they seem. The two stories sort of relate, but not enough to justify the constant momentum interruptions. I would have much preferred to see the monologues as standalone pieces; the writing by Courtney Baron is fluid and the characters are compelling. They just keep getting in each other's way.

Libe Barer, Robbie Tann
Here I Lie
Photo: Carole Rosegg

While none of the three plays is bad, as an evening, Series A lacks oomph. The sum of the parts is a tad smaller than the whole.

Wendy Caster
(press ticket, third row)

Constellations

Marianne and Roland first meet at a barbecue. No, wait. It was a wedding. She's interested in him, but he has a girlfriend. Or was it that he was just out of a relationship, not ready to date? The answer, actually, is all of the above. Constellations, Nick Payne's 2011 play, which is currently receiving its American premiere at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, espouses the wormhole theory that the world is made up of millions of parallel universes existing side by side. On each wavelength, we might live an identical experience, altered only by a minor variation. It affects how we live our lives, and, more to the point here, how we fall in love.

It's almost impossible to speak more specifically about the plot of this brief, beguiling play without ruining the eventual experience you'll have when you see it. And you should see it. Payne has managed to squeeze more meaningful interaction and thought-provoking questions into sixty unbroken minutes than any other play I've seen thus far this season. And despite what you might expect from the highly-stylized text and dramatic devices, Constellations is, at its core, a portrait of romance and connection. It's funny, moving, occasionally frustrating, and deeply human; in short, everything you could want from a play.

Constellations marks not only the Broadway debut of playwright Payne, but of the production's marquee names: Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson. Gyllenhaal previously starred in Payne's If There Is, I Haven't Found It Yet Off-Broadway; Wilson, a two-time Olivier Award winner in London, is best known for her current starring role on Showtime's The Affair. Both are extraordinarily good here. Never leaving the stage, they manage to map the complicated trajectory of an entire relationship in several dozen mini-scenes, some non-verbal, some lasting mere seconds. Rarely have I seen such an intense connection between two performers, and I imagine their bond will only grow stronger as this production moves towards its official opening on January 13. It's almost certainly guaranteed to be 2015's first must-have ticket.

[Last row mezzanine, deeply discounted ticket]