The Theatre Arts students participated in the Manhattan Theatre Club Core Education program of the Broadway Production of Constellations, by Nick Payne, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson. Part of this program, our students participated in workshops with Manhattan Theatre Club resident artist Melissa Murray-Mutch, and other professional actors, in order to prepare and discuss the play. During the workshops they acted, read, improvised and wrote their own scenes inspired by Nick Payne’s new play.
Constellations a two-character drama, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, playing a bee-keeper and Ruth Wilson, playing a Cambridge University cosmologist, is reviewed by the NYTimes as “the most sophisticated date play Broadway has seen”, “a 70-minute fugue-like production”, that “takes that most elemental of dramatic setups — boy meets girl — and then spins it into a seeming infinitude of might-have-been alternatives.”
The play, performed at Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, weaves in the principles of string theory, relativity and quantum mechanics, and really makes the audience think about choices and their consequence, alternate universes and the complexity of our world.
Our students thoroughly enjoyed the play, the versatility of the acting as well as the simplicity of the means by which the story was told. They participated in a question and answer session with Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson which they found fascinating and inspiring. “Overall, this was a very enriching experience and we are looking forward to more collaboration with the Manhattan Theatre Club in the near future,” says Raluca Shields, the Theatre Arts teacher at County Prep.
