By Craig Wright. Directed by Lisa Denman. Cherry Lane Theatre. (CLOSED)
Craig Wright's The Unseen, about two men imprisoned and tortured for unknown reasons, is compared unfavorably by critics to works by Kafka and Beckett. Most critics find the play largely ineffective for the lack of context and violence described in gruesome detail, but never shown. The one dissenter, Time Out's Adam Feldman, writes, "If the writing is good enough, violence needn't be seen to be believed." The reviews are kindest to the actors--Steven Pounders, Stan Denman, and especially Thomas Ward as their torturer.
Edit: Additional positive reviews pushed the grade from a C to a C+.
Nytheatre.com A+
(Josh Sherman) The Unseen, for any self-respecting theater snob, demands to be anything but. A riveting example of deceptive simplicity, The Unseen, fueled by the dazzling wordplay of playwright Craig Wright, turns solitary confinement into a potboiler thriller that not only sucks you in, but puts a choke hold on you until it has your undivided attention. With masterful direction by Lisa Denman and terrific, spellbinding performances from a first-rate cast, the Cherry Lane Theater might just have on its hands a sellout for as long as it wants one. The Unseen is a darkly comic, deeply thought-provoking, emotionally disturbing, and soul-searching masterpiece that will resonate with you for far longer than the blissfully quick 65-minute run time.
offoffonline A
(Edward Karam) The Unseen is bleak but not depressing, and it feels especially timely and universal in Lisa Denman's taut, riveting production. The men might be in Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or any number of hellholes around the world... Although the physical action is limited, Wright’s dialogue takes up the slack with unexpected lyricism, from the story of a button that Valdez’s mother has taught him, to Smash’s gruesome descriptions of what he has done to a prisoner. And his ending suggests, hopefully, that somehow humanity can never be extinguished, that an unseen spark survives even in the most inhumane circumstances. The play may be short, but it packs a wallop.
Time Out New York A-
(Adam Feldman) In any other medium but the stage, this piece—which mostly consists of wearily desperate conversation between two men in adjacent prison cells—would hardly be possible at all. It's almost all talk, but with enough Wright angles to keep you listening. The main characters are stock, but well flavored by director Lisa Denman's strong cast of actors unknown in New York.
CurtainUp B+
(Jenny Sandman) Kafka's The Castle, for instance, worked largely because there were no particularities—the lack of specificity, both made the tale more maddening and more universal because any regime/government/bureaucracy could be seen to fit. The same holds true for other existential works, like Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The Unseen has that same maddening lack of specificity. We don't know any more about the prisoners' crimes or fates than they know. But director Lisa Denman has chosen to highlight the few details that exist in the prison—the seemingly random buzzers, the tin plates and spoons, the lighting, the pattern of stonework, the bloody work that precedes Smash's inarticulate rage. The actors, too, channel their search for detail into Wright's precise language; trapped as the characters are, the actors aren't able to explore any range of motion, other than Wallace's fiddling with random scrounged objects and Valdez's aimless wandering. This makes the play less a commentary on political prisoners and the corruption of power than a simple story of two men who have largely given up. It's a fine story, to be sure, but this production lacks the broader context the script hints at.
The New York Times C-
(Anita Gates) Both Mr. Pounders and Mr. Denman give strong performances, but the gruesome show-stopping speech is delivered by Thomas Ward as a mysterious character named Smash. In it he describes feeling so sorry for a prisoner who was in pain that he decided to put him out of his misery, quite literally. Even fans of Quentin Tarantino’s exuberantly violent films may feel a bit squeamish. The denouement, however, is thin. The tension falls apart at the end. Maybe the anticlimax is the point, but it leaves “The Unseen,” directed by Lisa Denman (who is married to Mr. Denman), feeling like a fragment of a short story that should only be read in full. And a little bit like a limp handshake.
That Sounds Cool C-
(Aaron Riccio) These are some fine moral issues, but they are played too much for laughs. This clashes with the aesthetics, for Sarah Brown's set is cold and unyielding, Travis Watson's lighting is direct, and Dustin Chaffin's sound design is a simple buzzer that never ceases to be jarring. The lines have the glibness of Dirty Sexy Money and the meandering banter of Lost (both of which Wright has written for), but none of the depth. As a result, when Smash takes center stage and tells his prisoners that he's been shit on--literally--for being too "human," it's hard to feel where Ward's coming from. For all the gory descriptions, the fact that it's all unseen makes The Unseen play out like a G-rated Saw: moralizing without consequences. All this makes Lisa Denman's direction somewhat heroic, as if she's tried to salvage a comedy from an abbreviated political play. Unfortunately, if there's a punchline, that too goes unseen, and without one, it's just artifice. Now we know why Beckett always threw in a banana or two: he wanted his characters to at least have the potential of slipping on the peel.
Lighting & Sound America D+
(David Barbour) Wright is apparently conceived in the tradition of Harold Pinter's Mountain Language or Caryl Churchill's Far Away, works in which totalitarian brutality is presented bluntly and without any social or political context. The trouble with such an approach is that, once you remove the specifics, what's left seems artificial and more than a little arbitrary... Pounders and Denman do everything they can to make their characters interesting, as does Thomas Ward as Smash, but The Unseen sentences us all to an hour's confinement in a theatre filled with fancy metaphors and structureless action. (Smash has a monologue in which he recalls killing a prisoner, but is notably lacking in impact.) Lisa Denman's staging can't resolves these issues, but she does keep the pace up, which is much appreciated. Sarah Brown's multi-level collage of prison cells is visually interesting, although the walls seem too obviously painted. Travis Watson's lighting and Carol Booker's costumes are both perfectly okay. Dustin Chaffin's sound design mixes those aggravating buzzers with between-scenes interludes of morose piano music.
The Village Voice F-
(Alexis Soloski) The subject matter is overfamiliar, and the writing is overwrought. Wallace worries that news of the outside world might "fill the heart with unsatisfiable hunger for the peach that can never be reached." Smash delivers a gruesome monologue on the subject of eye, tongue, and vocal cord extraction. (Apparently, eyes are quite squishy.) Wright exploits gruesomely vivid imagery and figurative language, though rarely to much effect. Sometimes he turns to allegory, as when Wallace reflects on his own experience as a means to understand the universal human condition: "All that's plain as day," he says, "is that we're brought here against our will, and we're continually tortured and starved." That's a dreary view of the life—and Wright has written a dreary play to announce it.
Nytheatre.com A+ 14; offoffonline A 13; TONY A- 12; CurtainUp B+ 11; The New York Times C- 6; That Sounds Cool C- 6; Lighting & Sound America D+ 5; The Village Voice F- 0; TOTAL: 67/8 = 8.375 (C+)
3 comments:
Nightmare Scenarios
by Edward Karam
The Unseen reviewed March 8, 2009
Two men in grim, adjacent cells talk to each other through prison walls. They have been incarcerated for years and are repeatedly tortured for information—or rather, initially for information, but now pointlessly, as a distraction to their tormentors. The men in this Kafkaesque nightmare are named Valdez and Wallace. Wallace calls Valdez “Mr. Valdez,” but Valdez is more casual and uses “Wallace.” To pass the time, they speculate on what they don’t know—The Unseen of the title.
Dramatist Craig Wright’s Kafkaesque situation invites some comparison with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, whose characters also wait in uncertainty and near despair for some resolution to their fate. The Unseen is bleak but not depressing, and it feels especially timely and universal in Lisa Denman's taut, riveting production. The men might be in Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or any number of hellholes around the world. Their names, too, suggest a breadth of places the action might be occurring. "Valdez" calls to mind a banana republic; "Wallace" might be American or British, of which neither nationality has escaped accusations of torture in the struggles with Iraq and the IRA, respectively; and their guard, Smeija, has a distinctly Slavic name that summons up the brutality in the Balkans in the 1990s.
To pass the time, Wallace and Valdez exchange words in shorthand about their torture: “Trips to the sink, making knots … twice, the whole drooling gang…” Wright leaves it to the listener to surmise the specifics of the horrors they endure. The men play an old game that starts “I went to the ocean and took…,” and they list various objects whose names must be in alphabetical order. They speculate on whether the prison layout is irregular or not. “We don’t know the structures or rules,” says a worried Valdez. “We don’t know the grand design.” (His point is skillfully demonstrated by Sarah Brown in her asymmetrical set.)
Wallace moves objects on the floor of his cell—saucers and a piece of chalk and other objects—in a pattern that only he understands. Suddenly he announces that they must escape that day, that all the signs point to its being their only chance. But a visit from the hulking, black-masked thug Smeija, nicknamed “Smash,” reveals that Wallace’s sanity hangs on a thin thread.
Smash is not only a guard but one of their torturers, and Wright indulges in pitch-black humor as Smash (played with frustration and intensity by Thomas Ward) complains that he’s been too nice to them and is being punished with double duty on his birthday. Wallace tries to butter him up—“We’re here for you”—but it doesn’t work. “All you people think about are yourselves,” fumes their anguished inquisitor. “No one with a heart is safe around you people.”
Steven Pounders as Wallace captures his character's suspicion and confidence, with a streak of arrogance; he’s not sure that Valdez isn’t a spy. Valdez (Stan Denman) has opposite qualities: he is more upbeat and hopeful, certain that someone is in the adjoining cell and aching to make contact. He’s open enough to admit that his captors don’t trust him because they think he lies—even though his admission jeopardizes Wallace’s trust in him.
As time passes, Valdez exhibits his own delusions with a theory of a vast array of tunnels under the earth with the entry points in graveyards that is just as chilling as the moment that Wallace accidentally learns that his hope of escape is built on an illusion.
Both actors, superb in their roles, seem to have done their own makeup just as superbly. They look like victims of brutal beatings, with scars, welts and bruises disfiguring their bodies; costumer Carl Booker’s torn and shredding clothing matches their skill.
Although the physical action is limited, Wright’s dialogue takes up the slack with unexpected lyricism, from the story of a button that Valdez’s mother has taught him, to Smash’s gruesome descriptions of what he has done to a prisoner. And his ending suggests, hopefully, that somehow humanity can never be extinguished, that an unseen spark survives even in the most inhumane circumstances. The play may be short, but it packs a wallop.
nytheatre.com review
Josh Sherman · March 11, 2009
The Unseen, for any self-respecting theater snob, demands to be anything but.
A riveting example of deceptive simplicity, The Unseen, fueled by the dazzling wordplay of playwright Craig Wright, turns solitary confinement into a potboiler thriller that not only sucks you in, but puts a choke hold on you until it has your undivided attention. With masterful direction by Lisa Denman and terrific, spellbinding performances from a first-rate cast, the Cherry Lane Theater might just have on its hands a sellout for as long as it wants one. The Unseen is a darkly comic, deeply thought-provoking, emotionally disturbing, and soul-searching masterpiece that will resonate with you for far longer than the blissfully quick 65-minute run time.
The Unseen opens in an unnamed totalitarian regime where two prisoners, Wallace (Steven Pounders) and Valdez (Stan Denman), are each trapped in solitary, in what looks like a cross-section of a beehive. They speak to each other over the walls and through barred windows and it appears that they have never actually seen one another. They barrel through massive swaths of Beckettian banter and contemplate their existences—or complete lack thereof. They are required by their circumstances to invent their own worlds to survive—Valdez believes that there is a female prisoner in an adjoining cell, Wallace has created his own Mayan calendar out of kitchenware to best predict the precise moment they can both escape. Both are interrupted from their metaphors and flights of fancy at regular intervals by ear-splitting jail sirens and the occasional waterboarding from their reluctant tormentor/guard, Smash (Thomas Ward).
The Unseen is brilliantly structured by Wright as an unfair piece from the beginning—we never learn Wallace or Valdez's crimes, we never know what country we're in or who the dictator is—and that, in turn, allows it to achieve timelessness and a universal resonance. Part of the beauty of the script is that it behaves much like a musical composition where the fermatas in the piece provide us with space to probe our deepest feelings. At the moments when our protagonists' hopes are shattered, our own hearts sink as we inevitably think of our own prisons and our own failures as human beings that led us there. Smash (somewhat ironically) becomes the emotional pivot of The Unseen and his dual role as both abuser and therapist is too psychologically intense to be reduced to a sentence. (In other words, you really have to see it.)
I can report, unequivocally, that the work of all three actors is phenomenal. Wright's language is downright poetic and he has given award-worthy monologues to the character of Wallace, which Pounders devours and delivers with stunning panache. Denman, as Valdez, has the dramatic timing of a trained sniper. And Ward manages to evoke pathos for a character that performs regular acts of bloody violence.
Deeper still are the spiritual questions that Wright raises during the play's duration about the nature of our roles on life's grand stage: Who are we? Why are we here? Does any of this matter? Yet he pushes far beyond high-school level existential bullshit into a world where Wallace's dreams may or may not have become a reality lived by Smash, or Valdez's dreams of a fellow prisoner knocking on the wall may or may not be a secret language between them. Mystical without being religious or pushy, The Unseen addresses age-old questions that cannot be answered by Wright or any other mortal—but he achieves the playwright's dream of making his audience think about the questions on their way out the door.
Wright has written several plays, including Recent Tragic Events and Orange Flower Water, but lately has been working on television projects such as Lost and Dirty Sexy Money; he triumphs with The Unseen, and we should all thank him that he has decided to come back to give us a phenomenal gift.
For your sake, make sure that The Unseen isn't unseen much longer.
Thanks. Sorry I missed those. I added them in.
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