What happens when a beekeeper meets a nuclear physicist? Well, according to English playwright Nick Payne, they enter the quantum universe, in which every outcome is equally possible. (Incidentally, the nuclear physicist is a woman.) Payne's play "Constellations" details an array of these possibilities. You can see it at the Ancram Center for the Arts from August 16-25.
"Constellations" stars Andrus Nichols and Drew Ledbetter, who are married in real life. "Drew and I have never acted together before, which is unusual for a couple who are both actors," Nichols remarked. Not only that, but they're the only characters in the drama, and are both onstage the entire time. (This sort of play is technically a "two-hander.")
Also, their lives strangely parallel the play's plot. "When we finally met, we realized like that there were so many moments in our lives when our paths almost crossed, and didn't," Nichols explained. "Drew and I have the same manager, who has a tiny, tiny roster—I think at the time he represented 40 actors. I had just moved to New York City from San Francisco, where I was doing theater out there, and as you can imagine, the theater community in any city actually feels a lot like a small town. Everybody knows everybody else."
Yet the two never met, though Ledbetter's best friend was Horatio alongside Nichols' Hamlet in a San Francisco production. (Her future husband was in another play, so he couldn't see that "Hamlet.") After a series of near-misses, the couple met at Theatre Row in Manhattan in 2016.
Andrus and Drew are the first couple I've spoken to who have both played Hamlet. "And we both played it when we were 33," Ledbetter pointed out. "Our Jesus year," Nichols added. For Nichols, it was her first professional acting job. "Were you early in the history of female Hamlets?" I asked. "No, Sarah Bernhardt was early in the history of female Hamlets," she replied. (Bernhardt played the role in 1899—which you can see on film!)
Though they've never performed together, they did codirect "Our Town" at the Sharon Playhouse in Sharon, Connecticut—the town in which they live.
How will the two prepare for their roles in "Constellations"? Nichols will study string theory online; he'll spend a day in an apiary. As of July 3, when I spoke to them, they were already rehearsing lines around the dinner table. They'll go to a dialect coach, to help with their English accents. But it's a mistake to over prepare. "This is a really nimble play," Nichols remarked. "You don't want to go into the rehearsal process having made too many big decisions."
She hasn't been onstage since the fall of 2019, before the pandemic. Since then she's mostly worked in television—shows like "Rise," "The Blacklist," "FBI: Most Wanted," "Law & Order: SVU"—which is quite different from stage acting. "Television is a graphic medium," she explained. "Where you are in the frame, what the camera picks up, is so much a part of the storytelling. When an audience is in a theater, and there's two people on stage, they're hearing the play. Their eyes may go wherever their eyes go. They're not being told what to look at in the same way.
"Theater is a full-body experience. And I think that's true of both watching it, absorbing it as an audience member, but also performing it, as an actor."
"Constellations" premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2012. The play transferred to the West End, then moved to Broadway in 2015, where it starred Ruth Wilson and Jake Gyllenhaal.
