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.
