Constellations

*Featured image: Setting of “Constellations” – taken from Clarisza Runtung’s Facebook page

The lights dims, a girl and a boy walks through the aisle into the center circle. They are Marianne and Roland, and they tell the story of the two.

Constellations, written by Nick Payne, draws the enchanting life of a girl named Marianne, a physicist and Roland, a beekeeper who thinks she studies “something about space”. They both live in a multiverse – a world where “all decisions you make and don’t make coexist simultaneously”.

The multiverse is a concept of quantum mechanics, where many worlds exist depending on the choices made and actions taken. This interpretation implies that in every world contain a different variation of the life of a person, and the multiverse portrays all possible alternates of the past and the future, existing in parallel. It is described in the play’s accompanying note as many branches of a single tree, and reality is not simply a single footpath.

In many ways, Constellations reminds me of Déjà Vu. This bittersweet fairytale is delivered through various reiterations of the storyline, and the play proceeds to portray one particular course of actions that leads to their relationship and forms their life together. There are many times that Marianne and Roland almost would not have met each other, or would not have known each other, because of the little cues in what they say or their state of mind at the time, or the way they choose to deal with the situation, and their alternate choices would have taken part and existed in another universe. To think about it, the combination of actions that would lead to where they are right now is quite rare.

But Constellations is not just a story of physics. Far from that, it is also a love story. Because through all the randomness of the dice, they learn to live with the present. Even in a multiverse, there is no way to tell if one’s course of actions is better than another, because one does not know what the future will lead to. Every choice you make is the right choice, or that you build it into the right choice, because that is what we do as our responsibility to make us happy. One of the ideas that resonates with me most is the time you have with someone, that there are no more or less time to spend with another person if you learn to appreciate in the present, or to put it in the words of a character from my favorite book – Hazel’s words from The Fault in Our Stars, that even though “some infinities are bigger than other infinities […] I cannot tell you how grateful I am for our little infinity”!