“You have no idea what it’s like.”
People have said that to me several times while I’ve tried to be a good family member or friend to people with children. They’re right. I don’t have kids. I live a single, often solitary life surrounded by family of choice. Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers, an aching time-shifting play about loss and loose ends, brought me as close as I’d like to come. Loving that hard is terrifying.
Through an interwoven seven-year timeline, we meet Miriam (a locked-in Lauren Ambrose), soon-to-be ex-husband David (Tom Riley), and their daughter Margaret (Elizabeth Yeoman). But one family member is missing: their son Oscar.
The circumstances of the 15-year-old’s disappearance remain a mystery. What unravels over the next 110 intermissionless minutes becomes an exercise in maternal intuition, desperation, and a kind of guttural, unspoken grief that could shatter a window.
It wants better content.
Coming to terms with the unfathomable
But Paul Steinberg’s scenic design offers no windows. Instead, we’re invited into a sparse English dining room set at dramatic angles in New York City Center’s reconfigured Stage I, with part of the seating onstage in tiered church pews, a nod to Miriam’s first husband, Karl (Hadi Tabbal), who has become a vicar.
Under Knud Adams’ fluid direction, family members, including Miriam and Karl’s child Nancy (Nina Ross), along with officers assigned to the case, enter and exit from a darkened portal upstage or float in from the side, disrupting the fourth wall and linear timeline.
Each has a different way of coping (or not) with Oscar’s disappearance, from songwriting and séances to bursts of physical rage as they try to come to terms with the unfathomable.
Ambrose’s Miriam is caustic, cynical, and often wickedly funny, but beneath every barb is a maternal instinct so fierce it nearly destroys her. When she needles Karl about the results of his daily prayers for Oscar, he replies, “I’m not so much looking for results, as I am looking for a little help dealing with the incompleteness of the world around me.”
I still don’t know what it’s like to have children. But I believe I have an idea.
Is ‘The Unbelievers’ worth seeing?
Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers asks how long a family can hold its breath for a missing child, and Lauren Ambrose answers with a performance so ferocious that the waiting itself becomes the drama.
- New York City Center Stage I, 131 West 55th Street, New York City
- Notable performers: Lauren Ambrose, Tom Riley, Hadi Tabbal, Nina Ross, Elizabeth Yeoman
- Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes, no intermission
- Performances through November 29
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