Review Roundup: CONSTELLATIONS at The Armory

Silas Weir Mitchell and Dana Green star in Constellations - playwright Nick Payne's exploration of love in the multiverse - opening at The Armory on May 19, with preview performances beginning May 13, and regular performances running through June 11.

Portland Center Stage at The Armory's Artistic Director Chris Coleman will direct this multifaceted love story. Silas Weir Mitchell, who starred as the beloved Blutbad Monroe in NBC's six-season series Grimm, will play the beekeeper Roland. Dana Green, who was last seen at The Armory in Great Expectations and was also featured on Grimm as the Wesen Mabel Kurlon in season four, will play Roland's love interest, the physicist Marianne.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

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OR Arts Watch (AL Adams): Silas Weir Mitchell plays Roland-or rather, many Rolands-with a range of finely-calibrated choices. Repeating the same lines seconds apart, he deftly switches moods to come off as a creep, a curmudgeon, a charmer. His changeling skills make more sense when you consider where you probably last saw him: starring as a werewolf on TV's Grimm. On that show, Weir Mitchell's acting consistently deepened and dignified some pretty shaky scripts, so it's been nice to see him take on stronger writing in this production and a prior PCS play, Three Days of Rain.

Portland Tribune (Joseph Gallivan): The actors play a two- or three- minutes scene. There is a flash of stage lights and a groan from the sound system and they play it again, often with the same words, just different characterization through emphasis, intonation and body language. Most scenes are done three or four times. The changes are enough to keep the listener more engaged than wearied by repetition. Add to that the unfolding of the relationship, which telescopes two whole lives into the timeframe of a romance. This is exactly how society trains us to think about ourselves, so it hits the sweet spot of shared self-interest.

Oregon Live (Lee Williams): In "Constellations," you may lose track of Marianne and Roland's disorienting journeys and returns -- the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't follow these interstellar plots -- but you're constantly fascinated and surprised by where you're going next. And don't sweat the science. "Constellations" isn't like "Proof," the dizzying play about prime numbers that ran at Artists Repertory Theatre in 2003 and seemed to require a score of 700 or above on the math portion of the SAT to comprehend. If college physics was taught with this much creativity and joy, we'd all be Stephen Hawkings.

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