"Constellations" Is Gorgeous And Intimate, Until It Begins To Feel Like A Prison

The set of Portland Center Stage's production of Nick Payne's Constellations is a marvel. Vast, precise and dizzying, it looks like a diagram of a wormhole: The stage is emblazoned with a grid pattern that dovetails and curves upward.

It is also, like Payne's writing, a prison. Theoretical physicist Marianne and beekeeper Roland (respectively played by Grimm veterans Dana Green and Silas Weir Mitchell) meet at a barbecue and fall in love. But, like a VHS tape that's reconfigured every time you press the rewind button, Constellations repeats scenes of their relationship several times with alterations that shift the course of Marianne and Roland's affair.

To an extent, the stubborn simplicity of Constellations—it's confined to a single set and a single pair of actors—is enjoyably intimate. Green and Weir Mitchell speak in British accents and bumble their way through a sometimes touching romance. When they first meet, Marianne flirts with Roland by telling him that licking your elbow is the key to immortality (Green makes a valiant attempt). If that isn't weird enough, the scene eventually restarts with tweaked dialogue.

This game of reveal-and-reverse persists throughout the play as we follow Marianne and Roland through courtship, betrayal and reconciliation. Some of the revisions rely on subtle shifts in the tone of Green and Mitchell's voices. But some are more radical, including a harrowing sequence that portrays Marianne's myriad reactions to being diagnosed with cancer.

Those scenes enable Green to deliver a potent portrayal of a woman whose health is crumbling, but who refuses to relinquish her strength—her fierce declaration that a nasty fate will befall Roland if he dares to bring her balloons is one of the production's highlights.

Yet, even Green can't cut through the drudgery of the play. Marianne and Roland's relationship seems to exist in a bland vacuum: There's no hint of any kind of world beyond the two characters. The production doesn't truly engage you outside a series of beguiling interludes, in which lights isolate Green and Mitchell from their surroundings while ambient music plays.

Constellations never plunges us into the passion that supposedly bubbles beneath its characters' overly clever surfaces. Eventually, even the wild set wears out its welcome. Instead of seeming strange and magical, it just becomes frustratingly monotonous.

SEE IT: Constellations is at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave., www.pcs.org. 7:30 Tuesday-Sunday, 2:00 Saturday-Sunday, noon Thursday, through June 11. $25-$70.