The New York Times - Highly Recommended
"..."Constellations," Nick Payne's gorgeous two-character drama, starring a perfectly matched Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson, may be the most sophisticated date play Broadway has seen. This 70-minute fugue-like production, which opened on Tuesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, takes that most elemental of dramatic setups — boy meets girl — and then spins it into a seeming infinitude of might-have-been alternatives."
Hollywood Reporter - Highly Recommended
"...The play runs a fleet 70 minutes and includes multiple variations on a number of short two-character exchanges that's relatively limited by most dramaturgical standards. Yet it's packed with both incident and depth as it explores the many possible developments of a relationship that begins (or sometimes ends) when beekeeper Roland (Gyllenhaal) and Cambridge cosmologist Marianne (Wilson) meet at a party."
Variety - Recommended
"...Gyllenhaal has the charm and good looks of a leading man, but he's also got the acting chops of a chameleon character actor, equally believable as a driven investigative reporter ("Zodiac"), a sensitive cowboy ("Brokeback Mountain") or an obsessive gutter-press photographer ("Nightcrawler"). Here he gets to play someone whose character changes from minute to minute, and he's pretty amazing. So is Wilson, now best known through "The Affair" but carrying heavy theater credentials including an Olivier award for "Anna Christie" and one for "A Streetcar Named Desire." Her style as the brilliant, desperately needy Marianne is mercurial — and enchanting."
amNY - Somewhat Recommended
"...The play manages to feel slight and jam-packed at the same time, combining an uninteresting boy-meets-girl romance and a well-worn premise of right turn versus left turn with a hard-to-follow structure."
Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...This darn show really got me going, actually, on how we always see love and marriage in terms of time: This starts; it builds to this; it ends here, maybe with betrayal, maybe with death. It's pervasive. It structures our lives. But despite being, on some levels, a date-night show, "Constellations" makes the point that the whole idea of time in love is nothing more than a convenient illusion, until it fills us with necessary anguish at the point of loss."
NBC New York - Highly Recommended
"...The actors give true tour-de-force performances, notably when Roland reaches a moment where he may propose to Marianne. Gyllenhaal, reading from a script Roland has prepared, makes his overture with confidence one time; he does it again in a state of sheer terror, his hands trembling along with the paper on which he has scripted his big speech."
Time Out New York - Highly Recommended
"...Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson are the stars of Constellations, and as that implies, they must make themselves multiple. Inspired by quantum mechanics, Nick Payne's captivating play, directed crisply by Michael Longhurst, explores the idea of parallel universes in a mosaic of scenes that often restart and branch off in new directions, skipping forward and backward in time. "Every decision you've ever and never made" creates a different reality, and the play shows us fragments of some of them. It puts narrative in a house of infinite shattered mirrors."
