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The downside with writing a play about absence: How to fill the void? When a efficiency artist referred to as Miriam (Cynthia Nixon) vanishes in “The Seven Year Disappear,” a two-hander by Jordan Seavey that opened Monday on the Signature Center, we all know solely that she is a narcissist who steals the air from any room she enters.
“The Whitney is mine,” she exclaims within the opening scene, after her grownup son and manager, Naphtali (Taylor Trensch), informs her that the museum has made some kind of provide to Marina Abramovic. After seven years off the map, when Miriam returns, she has the gall to ask Naphtali whether or not he’ll assist flip his abandonment into her subsequent piece.
Scenes following Miriam’s reappearance, which happens on the heels of the 2016 election, are intercut with a reverse chronology of Naphtali’s seek for her, which is known as a quest to seek out himself — in a change of careers, a collection of sexual liaisons and lots of exhausting medication.
“The Seven Year Disappear” has the ostensible trappings of an art-world satire, and this New Group manufacturing, directed by Scott Elliott, seems sleekly designed to ship one. But satire requires a extra distinct standpoint, discernible targets, and a higher measure of specificity and perception. The staging right here, with an emphasis on type and high-tech mediation, seems eager to make up for his or her lack.
A mixture of stay and recorded footage of the actors is displayed on flat-screen TVs suspended above the slick, black set (by Derek McLane); at instances, their faces seem in close-up stills (projections by John Narun) that could possibly be digital advertisements for Jil Sander. Onstage, the actors are wearing black-canvas coveralls and fight boots (costumes are by Qween Jean), and intermittently converse into standing mics (sound is by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen). The cumulative impact is certainly one of performance-art cosplay, which could possibly be humorous if it didn’t appear so earnest.
Humor is meant to return from Seavey’s Oedipal conceit: Though Miriam is nowhere to be discovered, she’s additionally all over the place her son appears. Nixon performs the seven different characters Naphtali encounters, together with three he has sexual relationships with: his mom’s “ex-lover-slash-manager” (a quasi father determine), a co-worker in Hillary Clinton’s marketing campaign workplace (Naphtali swaps artwork for politics) and an Episcopal bishop internet hosting an orgy.
Nixon, a gently expert stage performer, performs every character as a barely exaggerated persona, like roles an artist would possibly attempt on to display that identification is a form of drag. If there are psychoanalytic underpinnings to this strategy, they’re not compellingly explored. The result’s two actors working in uneven registers all through, with Trensch because the so-called straight man to Nixon’s shuffle of gentle caricatures. (The exceptions are mother-son confrontations that Elliott pitches as earplug-worthy shouting matches.)
If Miriam persists as a vacuum on the play’s heart (What is her artwork like? Who is she except for a nasty mom?), so does her son. Equipped with the vocabulary and demeanor of a younger homosexual New Yorker, Naphtali — whose identify means “my wrestle, my strife” — talks elliptically about politics principally in service of quips that echo with hindsight concerning the nation’s rightward flip (“Under what circumstances might she presumably lose?” he asks, referring to Clinton). His kinks quantity to little greater than gentle provocations.
“Think about what artwork actually means,” Miriam urges her son, “and why we make it.” It’s a worthwhile command — and a daring one to make in a present that doesn’t handle to summon its personal satisfying solutions.
The Seven Year Disappear
Through March 31 on the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 1 hour half-hour.
