之前被秒了的...完全搞不懂NYT怎么就让度娘抽了
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Who knew that higher physics could be so sexy, so accessible — and so emotionally devastating?
“Constellations,” Nick Payne’s gorgeous two-character drama, starring a perfectly matched Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson, may be the most sophisticated date play Broadway has seen. This 70-minute fugue-like production, which opened on Tuesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, takes that most elemental of dramatic setups — boy meets girl — and then spins it into a seeming infinitude of might-have-been alternatives. …
The authors of these destinies may have unusual occupations. But it is essential that they register as schmoes like us. Mr. Gyllenhaal and Ms. Wilson, I am happy to report, have seldom appeared less obviously compelling on the surface. Their starlight has been banked and internalized. This means that while we see them as they see each other, we are also allowed to see them as they see themselves — which is as gauche lummoxes.
They are crippled by self-consciousness when they meet and remain so, to fluctuating degrees, even as they grow closer. “Constellations” is about, among other things, how inevitably fraught and imperfect communication is, even with people closest to you. Conversations here, both casual and life-changing (and these aren’t mutually exclusive), are always a matter of shouting and signaling across an unbreachable gulf. …
This makes the play both a treat and a potential trap for its performers. They have a glorious opportunity to keep trying out the same lines with different readings, which is standard practice on a movie set, but seldom in live theater.
But they must also bring the same weight and conviction to every interpretation, or else the play can feel like a virtuoso acting exercise. It’s no surprise that Ms. Wilson, a two-time Olivier Award winner, is comfortable with her role’s demands. But Mr. Gyllenhaal, whose theater experience is more limited, is every bit as persuasive.
They are both fluent in the awkward body language of nerds in love, and in the crossed signals of emotional ambivalence. But they use contrasting and complementary physical vocabularies to balance, gracefully and clumsily, shifts in power and longing, aggression and retreat.
Mr. Gyllenhaal’s Roland, a magnificent work of understatement, is the more naturally inhibited. His default stance is a hunch, with his hands buried in his pockets, and there’s a valiance in his eternal attempts to break through that posture.
Ms. Wilson is more expansive of gesture; you suspect that her Marianne sees her intellectuality as a social handicap, and she overcompensates by being louder and funnier than she needs to be. This makes her all the more moving whenever words start to fail her.
And though “Constellations” is a supremely articulate play, it knows that words inevitably fail, that they are never enough to bind two people together forever. Time, it turns out, is a more effective breaker of hearts than human beings, with all their conflicted intentions, can ever be. This story of parallel universes is universal in every sense of the word.