In 2009, the playwright Nick Payne, then just 25, won the admiration of English critics and audiences, along with the prestigious George Devine Award, for his remarkably self-assured debut, If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet. A year or so later, he made a series of choices that led to the play that confirmed him as one of the most dazzlingly gifted dramatists of a new generation—sharp, funny, wise, humane.
First, he chose to watch a documentary about the declining honeybee population and decided to write a play about an artisanal beekeeper, only to abandon it because, he says, “I wasn’t quite sure how you do bees live onstage.” Not long after this he happened to watch The Elegant Universe, hosted by the physicist Brian Greene, who explained the multiverse theory, which says that there exist a vast number of parallel universes in which we’re living out different versions of our lives based on our having made different choices, large and small, along the way.
One of the most heated races this awards season is in the category of lead actor, which is packed with veterans like Michael Keaton (“Birdman”), rising stars such as Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Theory of Everything,” “The Imitation Game”), and actors going outside their wheelhouse like Steve Carell (“Foxcatcher”).
