REVIEW: ‘Constellations’ is a three-body thinker

REVIEW: ‘Constellations’ is a three-body thinker

Nick Payne wrote Constellations for two actors. Kiara Pipino’s new staging gives it three.

The play follows Marianne, a physicist, and Roland, a beekeeper, whose relationship plays out again and again across different possible versions of their lives. In this production, those two characters are shared among Missy Maramara, Jenny Jamora, and Topper Fabregas.

It is an immediately visible change to the play. Staged in the round, the stage is a triangular platform underneath a suspended arrangement of fabric, wire mesh, and lights. The triangle repeats in the cast itself. Three actors occupy a play built for two.

Three bodies

The arrangement is specific. Jenny Jamora is Marianne opposite Topper Fabregas’ Roland. Topper is Marianne opposite Missy Maramara’s Roland. Missy is Marianne opposite Jenny’s Roland. Every actor plays both characters, and every actor also encounters each of the other performers from a different position inside the relationship.

Dressed alike in oversized dark suits with rhinestone details, the three of them visually look almost like one organism. There’s also a rhythm in how they respond to one another as Marianne and Roland’s story plays out.

That rhythm is where Maramara, Jamora, and Fabregas are especially good. None of the three dominates the production. They show enough control and awareness to adjust to one another quickly, and the rapid exchanges work because they appear to understand exactly what the other two are doing.

What makes those switches impressive is not that each Roland or Marianne becomes an entirely different person. We witness something much subtler here. They alter behavior, energy, physicality, and the way they relate to the person in front of them just enough to distinguish one dynamic from another.

So Jamora’s Marianne with Fabregas’ Roland does not feel identical to Fabregas’ Marianne with Maramara’s Roland. Missy’s Marianne opposite Jenny’s Roland produces another variation again. The lines may be returning and the same relationship may be replaying, but the actors allow each combination to come to life on its own.

There is a considerable amount of calibration involved. Sometimes the change happens quickly enough that the achievement is easy to miss. The cast makes those handovers look much simpler than they are.

Almost one 

This is where the production’s three-person idea works best. The trio can operate as one system while still making visible the slight changes created by a different body taking over the same role.

They also do not erase the gender dynamics that come with those bodies. There are still behavioral differences between the pairings, and the performances acknowledge some of the masculine and feminine dynamics that emerge when the roles move around.

Those differences make the experiment more interesting. They also create the problem at the center of the production.

When Missy is Roland opposite Topper’s Marianne, for example, the audience is not simply receiving two neutral vessels carrying the same characters. We are also watching a woman playing Roland opposite a man playing Marianne, with all the visual and behavioral information those bodies bring into the scene. Another pairing gives us two women. Another gives us a more conventional male Roland and female Marianne.

The actors can distinguish those relationships very well. The production then asks the audience to process those differences at almost the same speed that the performers can produce them.

And it is interesting, sure. But it makes this Constellations more of a thinker than it should be.

Keeping up

In nearly every exchange, you end up wondering, who is Roland now? Who is Marianne? Pipino requires of her audience their undivided attention but the switchovers happen with so little breathing room that the audience can spend too much time orienting itself to the new pairing to absorb the plot unfolding on stage.

The audience has to switch along with the actors.

At some point, that begins to compete with the emotional work of the play. Instead of being allowed to stay inside one version of Roland and Marianne long enough to feel its particular possibility, we can become conscious of the machinery moving us toward the next one.

The strange result is that this Constellations can feel more like science fiction than the human story of two people whose story unravel across endless possibilities.

Marianne’s identity as a physicist is still in the text, but the production’s clearest expression of the multiverse comes from its casting device. 

Concept over connection

The play keeps returning to two people and the lives they might have together, depending on chance, choice, timing, and circumstance. Here, it is easier to notice the mechanics of their big multiverse. What becomes harder is forgetting the system long enough to simply witness one of those lives.

This Constellations seems to want to be received almost as an experimental performance art. As an expression of the scale and breadth of multiple possibilities, it’s compelling. As a way into the lives of the two people at its center, it can leave too little time to breathe.

This reviewer watched the 3 PM, November 8 press preview.

 

Tickets: ₱1,500
Show Dates: November 13–15 and 20–22, 2026
Venue: The Mirror Studio Theater, Makati City
Running Time: approx. 1 hour and 30 minutes (without intermission)
Producer: Stages Production Specialists, Inc., MusicArtes, Inc.
Creatives: Nick Payne (playwright), Kiara Pipino (director)
Cast: Missy Maramara, Jenny Jamora, and Topper Fabregas (Marianne and Roland)