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. Payne then decided to write a play about a physicist, but he couldn’t quite shake the beekeeper—and so, he says, “I just took these two characters from different worlds and smashed them together in the same story.”

The result of that collision is the gorgeous, deceptively simple two-character drama Constellations, a smash at London’s Royal Court Theatre and later in the West End, which comes to Broadway’s Manhattan Theatre Club this month starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Roland, a beekeeper who makes artisanal honey, and Ruth Wilson as Marianne, a physicist specializing in theoretical cosmology. The episodic 70-minute play follows the course of their relationship, but its brilliant conceit is that it embodies the multiverse theory in its very structure, showing us five or six snapshot variations of each encounter, each with a slightly different outcome. “I thought this could give the play a shape and a rhythm and a musicality,” Payne says. “Part of Constellations is also me declaring to an actor right at the start that this requires a level of invention, interrogation, and playfulness that is inherent in any rehearsal room anyway—so why not make it explicit in the form of the show?”

During a lunch break in a midtown rehearsal room I meet the pair of actors charged with finding those qualities, both of whom saw and fell in love with the play in London. Though Gyllenhaal has four films in the can, he has been increasingly drawn to the stage, most recently playing a drifter with boundary issues in If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet. Wilson, an off-kilter beauty, first made a splash as a young governess in the 2006 BBC miniseries of Jane Eyre and has since become a star in the U.S. as the mysterious Montauk waitress on Showtime’s The Affair—though she is a stage veteran with two Olivier awards. “I’d just done five months with a camera in my face and was quite keen to get back onstage and back into my body,” Wilson says. “But I wanted something that challenged me in a different way.”