In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you've ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.
In the mind-bending love story that launches the Shadow Theatre season Thursday, a quantum cosmologist and a beekeeper meet by chance at a barbecue. And in the course of Constellations, the same scenes of their relationship play themselves out again and again in parallel universes — with a word or two changed, or an an inflection, or a tiny fragment of information withheld or revealed. Endless possibilities, very different arcs.
You know that feeling that there must have been a moment when everything could have turned out very different? In the great multiverse of "could-have-been" alternatives (including the one where I didn't pre-emptively drop out of high school physics to avoid flunkage) here's one I didn't see coming.
An actor sees a show in London that she "absolutely loves." She returns to Canada, has coffee with a favourite director, and says "I saw this great play!" Whereupon the director says, unprompted, "Is it Constellations?" Which brings us — through either a demonstration of ' quantum entanglement' or a cluster of odds-against possibilities — to the Shadow production of the 2011 two-hander by the young English playwright Nick Payne. The play, which has attracted admiration on both sides of the Atlantic, is directed by Amy DeFelice; it stars Liana Shannon, the actor who'd gone to London (and chosen to see Constellations instead of any number of other shows), and Mat Busby, the actor who didn't.
And now, weeks into rehearsal, there's this: I'm in the Varscona Theatre in the morning (improbable enough, in truth) with two actors. And Shannon and Busby are talking about quantum physics and free will vs. destiny (more improbable still) instead of, you know, motivation and sight lines. And, as it turns out, the smart, genial stage manager Chris Nelson happens to be a physics buff, with things to say about the intersection of higher physics and the arc of the love story.
"That's romantic," says Shannon, appreciatively. I'm wishing I'd had a science teacher like Stamp in school. Things might have turned out very differently.
In a parallel universe Busby and his actor wife Jenna Dykes-Busby, for example, might not have an adorable 16-month-old baby named Violet who's busy acquiring molars. They might never have met. And Busby might not have spent the summer working at the Varscona (he's an artistic associate at Teatro La Quindicina), appearing in Andrea House's Chasing Willie Nelson at the Fringe, and getting virtually no sleep.
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