Hamish Linklater, Miriam Silverman, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Dylan Baker (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
The Disappear
By Julia Polinsky
The Disappear, Erica Schmidt’s clever, talkative take on the marriage of tragedy, comedy, art, creativity, and, well, marriage, is now open at Audible’s Minetta Lane theater. As Schmidt directs the play, the intimate space emphasizes the claustrophobic nature of the lives of charming narcissist filmmaker Benjamin Braxton (Hamish Linklater) and his wife Mira (Miriam Silverman). They live, together with their daughter Dolly (Anna Mirodin), in the Hudson Valley farmhouse where the story takes place.
Schmidt’s play paints a sharp portrait of how difficult it is to disappear into your work when someone else is there all the time. Apparently, that’s all that Ben wants: to disappear into his work. Ok, also: Ben wants to disappear into his mid-life crisis. Oh, he also wants to have his hugely successful wife disappear from his life, and he wants that so much that he revises his original project to make a film about a man whose wife disappears.
But he does not want to disappear from control of his filmmaking, or from making his own (borderline disastrous) decisions about his life and art. He wants his ditsy new “muse,” Julie Wells (Madeline Brewer), a B-list blonde who comes to the farmhouse with her straw bonnet, her truly terrible fake British accent, and her blazing ambition, to audition for Braxton’s new film. Nor does Ben want to disappear from the life of his teenage daughter, although he’s pretty shallow there anyway, at least until the second act.
As a portrait of the artist as a midlife crisis – a trope we’ve seen a lot – The Disappear is engaging and entertaining. Clever, witty dialogue flies by, almost feeling old-fashioned in its linear snappiness. The killer cast includes the wonderful Dylan Baker as Michael, Ben’s long-time producer, who perfectly captures the frustration and rewards of dealing with a creative jerk. Kelvin Harrison Jr. is featured as Raf, the A-list star who signs on to Ben’s new project because he’s a huge fan of Mira’s novels, and insists Mira write the script. Which she has never done, but hey, why not? Annoy her husband, do some good work, and get the attention of a hot young star? Total win.
Kelvin Harrison Jr., Miriam Silverman (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
Of course, this setup offers plenty of opportunity for farce, another old-fashioned aspect to The Disappear. Ben even gets the physical humor of farce down, and there are plenty of popping-in-and-out entrances and exits, overheard secrets, and peeking through windows at compromising moments. But The Disappear isn’t straight farce.
Nor is it a Chekhovian country-house play, no matter the rural family farmhouse setting (superb set by Brett J. Banakis), Ben’s vintage suspenders, Julie’s wildly weird “period” clothing choices (costumes by Jennifer Moeller and Miriam Kelleher). The waving grasses outside the house evoke Russian dacha rather than Hudson Valley farmhouse, though they do set off Cha See’s beautiful lighting design. Not to mention, the surprising absence of phones, laptops, screens of any kind, all through the first act. Ben writes by hand, on paper, in a leather notebook. What century are we even in?
Anna Mirodin, Madeline Brewer, Hamish Linklater (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
Modernity does, of course, eventually intrude. Dolly hammers on her adolescent one-note dedication to mitigating climate change, another trope we’ve seen often. Michael talks about the loss of his California home in the LA fire, which bring us up sharp. When Mira writes, she uses a laptop, and when mother and daughter watch the awards ceremony moment that provokes the denouement, the modern world wins out. The changes after that awards ceremony are profound: there is coupling and uncoupling, parenting and un-parenting, producing and winning, and personal growth. Except, of course, for Ben, who seems frozen into what he wants to disappear into, and might even manage it, in the final scene.
The Disappear: funny and sad, coherent and disjointed, modern and antique, all at the same time. Super performances of a clever script by a stellar cast make the show fly by.
At Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane
Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes, one intermission
Through February 22
