British playwright Nick Payne’s award-winning play Constellations is described as a take on string theory, the multiverse, free will, choice and love. Intriguing right? That’s exactly what Last Page Collective’s Samragni Dasgupta thought as well. The director’s latest production brings this script to the stage, but with her own spin on it.
Last Page Collective was started in 2019, with the aim to be a space for learning and promoting performance arts. Constellations is their fourth production. When searching for a play to perform, Samragni was looking for a production that could be performed with minimal actors. “I was looking for something with a smaller cast. The problem we always have in the theatre circuit in India is lack of funding. For us, it is important to pay all actors what they are worth,” the director says. While looking for scripts, she came across Nick Payne’s work. It was also recently adapted to stage in Mumbai by director Bruce Guthrie, in a production starring Jim Sarbh. And she found it to be technically and emotionally intense so she chose it.
Payne’s script is a romance at heart, but one that asks existential ‘what if’ questions about parallel universes and alternate realities. “The play is about life, love and loss. It’s about how one choice can
have rippling effects and change your life completely. It’s also about letting go and growth,” Samragni says. The story of the play is not linear and explores many different timelines. “We, as humans, may
experience time linearly, but things happen parallelly and each choice of ours is leading us to a completely different life,” she adds.
Constellations follows Marianne and Roland, two young women in London. They meet each other at a party and that first meeting leads to a relationship. It then opens up many different storylines in different universes. The original play features a hetrosexual couple, but Samragni decided to make the protagonists queer. “The way the story is written, it could be about any couple. It is just about how two people meet and how their life progresses together. This could happen to any two people,” explains Samragni, who also identifies as queer. Constellations will feature a rotating cast of three actors — Sreya Muthukumar, Sanjna Banerjee and Yamuna Kali.
Rs 300. June 10, 7.30 pm. At Jagriti Theatre, Whitefield. June 12, 7.30 pm. At Lahe Lahe, Kodihalli
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