BWW Review: Vagabond Players' CONSTELLATIONS Has Its Cake and Eats It Too

Playwright Payne's evident intent here was to illustrate the fullest range of things that can happen when Boy Meets Girl. Boy and Girl here are, respectively, a Wiltshire beekeeper named Roland (Christian Smith) and a University of Sussex cosmologist named Marianne (Ryan Gunning). We are plunged right into the multifariousness of possibilities as they first encounter each other at a party. Each version of the encounter starts approximately the same way, with Marianne venturing a pickup line about the impossibility of licking one's elbows. But in the first, he is not available, because he is still sorting himself out after a recently ended relationship. In the second, he is married. In the next universe, other facts are different, but he is again married. Only on the fourth a?oeGroundhog Daya?? variation do the variables permit them to proceed. And then we follow them in similar fashion through differently realized smorgasbords of first dates, him proposing, her cheating, him cheating, them breaking up, them encountering each other in a post-breakup context, etc.