The production design of Nick Payne’s Constellations has more in common with a scientific fair exhibition, or a hip club even, than your regular theatre set. A square platform surrounded by a thin fluorescent light at its center, with countless white balloons of various sizes hovering above it. What they represent - like everything else in the play - is strictly up to the spectators, who are only given two clues (or are they rules?). There are only two characters: Marianne (Ruth Wilson) and Roland (Jake Gyllenhaal), who meet at a barbeque and begin to flirt. He’s a beekeeper, she works in quantum physics. He has a girlfriend, so she flirts back reluctantly not before explaining that, “in the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you’ve ever made and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.” He tells her how much this turns him on.

Over the next hour (the play runs a smooth seventy minutes) we will see the many possible outcomes of this meeting. In one universe, Roland and Marianne pursue a romance that ends in heartbreak as infidelity enters the scene, in another he marries someone else, in yet another it is death that pulls them apart, in another they meet at a dance class...the possibilities it seems are truly endless. The one constant is that Roland and Marianne always seem to meet, which is Payne’s way of exploring the idea of soul mates as something that might have little to do with free will and more to do with predestination.

Payne cleverly achieves just the right balance between profound intellectualism and romantic comedy conventions, because for all of the play’s ingenious use of physics and biology to delineate parallels between worlds we otherwise ignore, it remains vastly entertaining and quotable. The acting is terrific as well, with Gyllenhaal bringing a sense of everyman-ness to Roland and Wilson delivering one of the most refreshing romantic heroines seen on Broadway in recent years. Her Marianne contains a multitude that makes you understand why the stubborn universe would keep trying to put her in your way, she goes from manic to sensual, to explosive in a matter of seconds (the change of tone in each tiny scene is remarkable) without ever becoming just an accessory to Roland’s purpose. If there is a sun around which the play revolves it’s Marianne, and Wilson’s performance is nothing if not radiant.