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WTF?<\/p>\n
That is how Sean Hayes as Elliott reacts at a startling moment in this 75-minute solo play, and how Hayes as Larry, Elliot\u2019s best friend, reacts to Elliott\u2019s increasingly obsessive behavior. It\u2019s also how I reacted to the final twist in \u201cThe Unknown,\u201d a thriller by David Cale that opened tonight at Studio Seaview<\/p>\n
If the ending in particular made little sense to me, I\u2019m not sure how much logically the rest of the play holds up under scrutiny either. Yet logic be damned: \u201cThe Unknown\u201d plays masterfully from moment to moment with audience expectations. Sean Hayes portrays eleven distinctly different characters with what feels like effortless clarity, even as the story becomes ever-more clouded and convoluted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Unknown\u201d is the third time that Cale, normally a downtown monologuist who performs his own material, has produced a solo show for another actor to perform, each of them in the thriller genre, and all of them collaborations with director Leigh Silverman. The first of these was \u201cHarry Clarke<\/a>,\u201d in 2017, when Billy Crudup portrayed a Midwestern con man reinventing himself as a British charmer, which ends with a disturbing question: How much has his fake identity overtaken his real one? This latest play goes deeper into the genre. We wind up questioning what\u2019s reality,\u00a0<\/p>\n At the start, Elliot tells us that he is a successful gay writer who had been paralyzed by writer\u2019s block for weeks when Larry and Chloe\u00a0\u00a0offered him a solo stay in the couple\u2019s isolated cabin in upstate New York, free of distractions \u2013 no Internet, no phone service.<\/p>\n The night Elliott arrives, resting in their bed, he hears a voice outside the house singing\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI wish you\u2019d wanted me That\u2019s a song that Elliott himself had composed for a musical he wrote years ago \u201cLover\u2019s Way.\u201d He is unable to find out who is singing, and the voice starts coming from different directions.<\/p>\n If this were a straightforward horror movie, the plot might have unfolded entirely in this haunted cabin in the woods, with Elliott trapped inside. But instead, he high-tails it back to the city the next morning. Two days later, he finds the lyrics of that same song taped to his mailbox in his apartment building in Greenwich Village.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how much more I should tell you.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ll try to be vague. There are twins involved. There is a scene in Julius\u2019s, a landmark gay bar in the Village, which includes a digression into the historical significance of that bar. Something I can\u2019t leave out: Elliott (who, remember, is struggling to end his writer\u2019s block) pitches the unsettling story that he\u2019s living in real time to two film producers, who like the idea, and wonder if Jude Law could play one of the leads. This hints at metatheatrical goings-on, serves as Cale\u2019s light jab at himself as well as at the industry,\u00a0\u00a0and also offers a motive however thin for Elliott to take actions \u2014 half detective, half thrill-seeker, half provocateur\u2013 that are otherwise inexplicably reckless. He wants to live through and then write about a story that would interest Jude Law.<\/p>\n Would\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe Unknown\u201d interest Jude Law?\u00a0\u00a0Only, it seems to me, if he\u2019s willing to perform it on stage.\u00a0\u00a0This is a trickster\u2019s play, in a production with almost no set, but Cha See\u2019s oblique lighting and Caroline Eng\u2019s sound enhancing the tension and the teasing; scarier, or at least creepier, because it is live.<\/p>\n
How different life would be\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n