A Queery of Everything: Queer-Conscious Casting and Multiverse Dramaturgy

This article investigates the theatrical casting of straight roles as queer (what I am calling queer-conscious casting) and how this choice can be read in relation to historic casting practices as well as queer theories of time and space. The case study is Nick Payne’s Constellations, directed by Michael Longhurst (London, 2021). The play investigates string theory by presenting how a particular moment may/does have many outcomes by showing the different outcomes of a straight couple’s evolving relationship. In unifying quantum mechanics, general relativity, and particle physics, string theory is a theory of everything and points towards the potential of a multiverse, where everything anyone has ever and never done exists in infinite spacetime. Longhurst’s production extends the investigation of multiple universes by casting four distinct couples to perform over the production’s run including a gay, interracial couple (performed by Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey). In this article I examine the tensions created when Douglas and Tovey perform many universes of heteronormative love as queer by extrapolating upon criticisms of colour-conscious casting and interrogating theories of queer temporality in relation to the multiverse. The queer multiverse might hold a spacetime for many seemingly contradictory ideas to find unity: a queery of everything.