'Constellations' collide in Gulfshore drama

Cody Nickell admits he and his wife, Kate Eastwood Norris, thought they were walking into a gimme after slogging through a summer of Shakespeare when they accepted the boy-meets-girl roles in "Constellations" at Gulfshore Playhouse.

A fair assumption, given that Norris had taken on the task of playing the traditionally male role of Hamlet, with the Santa Cruz Shakespeare company, and Nickell, as Laertes, was plotting her death.

But the assumption was wrong.

"We thought we were going to go back and do this little two-person play, but it's really demanding," said Nickell. "There's a good deal of physicality involved. But that's not in the sense of a lot of movement. What Matt (Pfeiffer, the director) is trying to create with us is a style of acting that maybe looks improvisatory, but we actually have to be very specific physically or we might give off the wrong clues."

"Constellations" wends its way through conversational overtures between two nerdish characters that veer onto strange, or sweet, or forbidding tracks — with romance and love, like the constellations, ever in the background. Nick Payne, the young British playwright who wrote it, is still close to its dramatic nuances and is an astute student of them.

Nickell, a former artistic associate at Gulfshore Playhouse, has furthermore parsed with Norris a few of their own life trajectories that came from small decisions they made: "There are certainly parallels. What if we hadn't said yes to the one job we met on? Or hadn't flown to see each other when one of us was working in California?

"We're a collection of our choices. So if my mom hadn't signed me up for acting lessons when I was a child, where would I be today?" he asked.

"It continues, too," Norris addded. "Cody leaving five minutes later because you forgot to turn the coffee off can cause him to miss a traffic accident. Or be in a traffic jam. It sounds corny or sappy, but it's the butterfly effect."

The play, as is Norris, is set in contemporary England and there are British accents, but not dominant. The situations that rise — or crash — are what tell the story, or as Norris calls it, "surfing, riding the wave of the journey of the emotion."

Being married to your protagonist onstage isn't a benefit when you're entirely another person, Actually, says Nickell, "there's been a couple of times in rehearsal where we make each other break up." But generally the two like being hired for the same productions, where they feel the directors know they're getting two seasoned professionals.

"We met 10 years ago and spent the first half of that not working together," recalled Nickell. "Then we started making a concerted effort to work together, and I'd say we've been lucky enough to work at least 24 to 36 months together at this point."

"I can't remember the last time we didn't work together," his wife added. This will only be her second play at Gulfshore Playhouse, however. (She starred in "Body Awareness" several years ago.) Nickell, on the other hand, is a veteran of at least a dozen productions at Gulfshore Playhouse, including a local favorite that returned three holiday seasons running, "Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol."  

"It's a lot of fun," Nickell declared of his own character. Within the scenes, most of them short, the characters take on different personalities "where you're playing multiple characters, but there's a partner, so you get to careen around together."

Norris cautioned that the audience shouldn't come in expecting five versions of the same date: "You see us playing a set of words as one type of person, and then you see us play the same set of words as a different type."

"Constellations" is a play for anyone who's been in love and who would like to explore the theory of intersections that plays into a relationship, said Nickell: "I think as an audience member, you'll feel smart."

If you go

'Constellations'

Where: Gulfshore Playhouse, Norris Community Center, 755 Eighth Ave. S., Naples

When: Tuesdays through Sundays, beginning with a preview Friday at 8 p.m. through Oct. 30; 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, with 3 p.m. matinees on selected Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, and a 7 p.m. performance Oct. 23

Tickets: $20-$64

To buy: www.gulfshoreplayhouse.org or 866-811-4111

Something else: There are audience-cast "talkbacks" at selected performances; see the website for detals

 Playwright is Nick Payne. 

Directed by Matt Pfeiffer