CONSTELLATIONS

The premise was good for an easy laugh in “Sure Thing,” a sketch in David Ives’s All in the Timing: The universe lets an awkward couple-to-be rewind, edit, and repeat an unsuccessful first encounter until they get to happily-ever-after. But in British playwright Nick Payne’s award-winning 2012 drama, the cosmos seems haunted by the parallel worlds in which a couple’s alternate versions play out as variations on crucial moments in their relationship. As beekeeper Roland and physicist Marianne navigate multiple decisions—“Imagine rolling a dice six thousand times,” as Marianne says of their quantum status—the infinite possibilities dwindle to a narrowing set of available outcomes. Bartlett Theater artistic director Jonathan Bohun Brady returns to Northgate Mall’s Stadium 10 theaters—where he directed The Flick last fall—with actors Emily Rieder and Jon Parker Douglas, in what The New Yorker calls “a brilliant metaphysical meditation.” —Byron Woods