Constellations at Geffen LA

Seeing CONSTELLATIONS on Broadway 2 years ago with Jake Gyllenhall and Ruth Wilson was for me one of the great theater outings of that season, a profoundly moving play only 80 minutes long with 2 actors who both surprised me at the depth of their respective talents that I hadn't seen in them before. Watching this play might have been the last time I cried warm tears in a theater.

So last night I headed with happy anticipation to the Geffen where a new mounting of the play is in previews, starring Allen Leech (Tom Branson the ex-chauffeur from Downton Abbey) and Ginnifer Goodwin of Once Upon a Time. Lots of good news to report here-- the play is still spell-binding in its complexity: a study of 2 people who fall in love fragmented into endless alternate versions of each scene as if viewing parallel universes at the same time. The staging is a bit more articulate than the obtuse Bway version, giving us a bit more furniture and a more clear-eyed abstraction of the cosmos as a set that helped us track the separate scenes and time-spans more clearly. The music/soundscape was evocative and precise in leading us through the maze of worlds.

This two-hander is as pure a showcase for acting virtuosity as you're ever gonna find; you need both partners to be at the top of their game every second onstage for the thing to work. Only a couple of performances in, I thought Allen Leech was already living in the part of Roland completely and without reservations. So vulnerable, so exact in calibrating his level of joy or pain at each stage of the relationship, his performance was just heartbreaking, every bit the equal of Gyllenhall's. Ginny Goodwin has the accent and the precision of each beat down pat, and is riveting in the later sequences when disability enters the equation. But I felt her acting out the joy more than just being joyful, acting out falling in love rather than just falling. She's lovely onstage, but just this side of too controlled for me.

I wanted to fall along with them, but this early in the show's run, they didn't quite get me there. Still, the ingredients are all there for magic between these two highly talented stars given another couple of performances. Even now, what a lovely smart evening awaits anyone who takes the journey with them.

I don't mean to undersell Goodwin's performance here. Her work as an actress is strong and funny and affecting and very stage-worthy at the Geffen. With so much skill on display, I thought her best moments were when she would just BE as Marianne.