Hamish Linklater, Miriam Silverman, and Dylan Baker in The Disappear.
Photo: Jeremy Daniel
Two years ago, this magazine published a story about four writers entangled in a messy net of bad life choices and what sounded like, at best, middling literature. The short version: Hannah was married to Andrew, and Anna was married to Ryan. Then Anna and Andrew slept together and both marriages blew up. Then, six years after that, just as Andrew was finishing the manuscript of a novel closely paralleling his breakup, he found out that Hannah had beat him to the punch: Her book about a marriage-destroying affair (subtitled “A Memoir [kind of]”) would be published nine months before his.
Ouch. And also, who cares? Whatever quiver of interest one felt in the Passion of Hannah and Andrew, that flame was quickly suffocated by the subjects’ narcissism. These people didn’t need book deals. They needed shovels — to start digging their way out of their own navels.
The air is similarly thick with egotism in the Minetta Lane Theater right now, as Erica Schmidt’s malignant-marriage story, The Disappear, makes its debut there. Set in an ancestral Hudson valley farmhouse belonging to a successful Hollywood director and his novelist wife—dark wood, old carpets, old books, abstract fields of wheat right up to the front door—the play reaches for something Ibsen-esque: Here, big ideas will be explored as human cruelties and frailties tear domesticity apart. But it’s a promise that Schmidt’s writing can’t keep. The Disappear quickly reveals itself as bitter and thin, its in-crowd jokes sucking oxygen from the room and its greater thematic aspirations (“A seriocomedy about making art while the world is falling apart,” reads the subtitle) flattened under anvils of layerless dialogue.
As with the true story of the adulterous writers, there’s something at the center of The Disappear that feels cringily solipsistic. Schmidt, who also directs, appends her script with a loud version of the standard disclaimer: “These characters are entirely works of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons is totally coincidence, art and lies.” Still, it’s hard not to sense weird personal ripples in the mix. The Disappear concerns the strained marriage of two artists, Benjamin Braxton (Hamish Linklater) and Mira Blair (Miriam Silverman). He’s the director; she’s the novelist. He’s mid-midlife crisis and gaga over an actress—young, blonde, beautiful—named Julie Wells (Madeline Brewer), whom he wants for his new movie (and also, of course, just wants). She—Mira—is going to end up writing the screenplay for that movie, because its bigger-name star, a pensive hottie and a fan of Mira’s novels called Raf Night (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), demands it.
In real life, Schmidt is married to Peter Dinklage. She wrote a Cyrano musical for him and adapted it into a screenplay for the 2021 movie, which co-starred Haley Bennett—young, blonde, beautiful—as Roxanne and Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Christian. Ben and Mira have been married twenty years and have a 15-year-old daughter (Anna Mirodin); same with Dinklage and Schmidt. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to spend a lifetime coming second?” Mira asks Ben’s producer, Michael (Dylan Baker, doing British and tart). “You must know what it’s like,” she goes on, “to stand next to the person everyone is looking at.” Elsewhere onstage, everyone is in a flutter over Raf’s “expressivity,” “range,” and “depth” … Offstage, Harrison’s Playbill bio begins by describing him as “one of the most in-demand actors, acclaimed for his “emotional depth and transformative range.”
Are we being trolled? I make no implications about Schmidt’s marriage. I hope it’s going great — but also, I’m not really interested in it. The real issue is that The Disappear occupies such a cramped, echoey niche that it fails to provoke any greater interest in the relationships of its characters. Seemingly obsessed with art, it never actually displays much of it. Andrew Ewell—the real-life writer who slept with his wife’s best friend and then wrote about it—protested to New York that “everything’s fair game” in writing as long as you “don’t make shitty art.” In The Disappear, Mira and Ben’s daughter, Dolly, mulls over a similar sentiment during a conversation with Raf. When he suggests to her that some art might be, as she puts it, “worth smashing up real life,” she concludes, “Better make sure it’s f’ing good art.”
For one thing, easier said. For another, only the already self-absorbed resort so glibly to genius as their Get Out of Jail Free card. Schmidt would have us believe that all her onstage artists are masters of their crafts — they’re constantly extolling each other’s talents while also mostly treating each other like shit. But as characters, they’re barely rounded, let alone plausibly brilliant. Most of them are stuck between the gears of their playwright’s conflicting impulses — on the one hand, to write multifaceted people; on the other, to go for easy dunks with things like Ben’s morbid, flailing self-obsession and Julie’s unblinking, do-anything-for-the-role mania. (Schmidt’s way of showing us that Julie is no ditz is to keep her constantly quoting from Great Literature.) In the end, what aspires to complexity comes off simply as contradiction.
The only thing that puts wind in The Disappear’s heavy sails is the real people attempting to give some sense of depth, breadth, and humor to the near-caricatures on stage — especially the play’s quarrelsome leads. Silverman and Linklater are both far too good for their roles, and there’s a certain fascination in watching them, as actors, take opposite tacks in attempting to flesh out what they’ve been given. Silverman is as natural and unbothered on stage as a cat. She’s so at ease in her body and voice, so far from pushing as she works, that she makes Mira into a more nuanced human being simply by virtue of her own rich presence. Linklater, by contrast, is all contorted limbs and histrionic moans. Elastic of limb and timbre and a marksman for a laugh, he turns Ben into a head-to-toe clown. Whether or not it’s a calculated decision, it’s a clever one — probably the only one that could render the character as something apart from 100 percent insufferable.
Theater can be a peerless instrument of self-reflection, for meditating not only on its own creator but on its own form. But the medium as mirror can’t be an end in itself. We’ve got to be able to step through the looking glass, to go somewhere that requires more courage and uncertainty. The Disappear wants to be interested in the world; it is, at least, disturbed by it. Dolly voices the play’s anxiety, worrying that she’s “just as bad as my parents, focusing so myopic on their art that they’re, like, basically missing how the world — the world they say I’m supposed to inherit — is complete and total shit and, like, extremely scary.” Dolly’s not wrong that it’s dark out there, and that it’s hard to figure out how to be, or how to create, in the face of it. But self-awareness doesn’t obviate self-absorption. The Disappear might diagnose its own myopia, but it offers no corrective lens.
The Disappear is at the Minetta Lane Theatre through February 22.
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