Wallace (Danny McCarthy) and Valdez (Steve Key) have only words to keep them from madness and utter despair. Stuck in a prison located in some undisclosed location, these two men have not seen daylight in ten years—and they've never seen each other’s faces. When they're not hanging out, staving off mental decay with word games, philosophical meanderings, and increasingly loopy debates about the design of their prison and nature of the regime that keeps them there, they're being tortured.
Sound grim? It is, and it only gets grimmer. Yet "The Unseen", at least when I saw it, had the audience erupting in peal after peal of hysterical laughter. Valdez’s stubborn hopefulness (imagine Jimmy Stewart covered in bruises and bleeding from the face, but still going to Washington, goshdarnit), and Wallace’s incessant, hyper-intelligent ironic meta-commentary create a kind of hot-air balloon of humor, madly afloat in spite of everything. Craig Wright’s verbally nimble, philosophically probing script and brilliant acting from the three-man cast keep the play riveting as it careens between hilarity and horror.
But the play is also guilty of a crime of omission. Director Dado has arranged the space so that the torturer, Smash (played as a terrifying blend of homicidal maniac and sniffly crybaby by Keith Kupferer), enters from the audience; this draws an implicit parallel between our gaze and his. Yet the production stops short of asking us to fully identify with a man who justifies torture and murder with the claim that he’s just doing his job.
And yet, I think, that’s what "The Unseen" asks us to confront. In the play’s breathtaking final moments, playwright Craig Wright’s quietly undoes the lesson of Sartre’s "No Exit." Hell isn’t other people. For Wallace and Valdez, it's salvation. That’s a lovely realization, but it’s embedded inside another, far less comforting one. For the audience, their suffering is our entertainment.
Reviewed by Centerstage!
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