Whatever chaos ensues in “The Disappear,” Erica Schmidt’s baffling midlife crisis comedy that opened Thursday at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater, the show’s initial confusion seems intentional. The set (by Brett J. Banakis) is misdirection: it shows us the shadowy interior of a dark-wood-and-velvet country home; at the stage’s periphery, the yard is a field of tall, pale grasses, which recall the Russian steppe. No obvious electrical devices appear in this library-like great-room, and the play begins with the actor Hamish Linklater flinging himself from leather armchair to fainting couch to antique desk, an artist clearly caught in the timeless anguish of writing.
Where are we? When are we? For a moment, Linklater’s salt-and-pepper beard seems reminiscent of Anton Chekhov’s. But then the front door opens and contemporary life — Miriam Silverman in polished denim and a savage little bob — comes bustling in.
After this feint toward the theatrical past, Schmidt’s play reveals itself as a modern-day domestic farce about artists and their egos: Linklater is Ben, a filmmaker consumed by his own process as well as his new actress, the naïf-fatale Julie (Madeline Brewer), a spacily self-dramatizing American temptress who affects a (variable, much-mocked) British accent. The Tony Award-winning Silverman is Mira, a gifted novelist and Ben’s patient, capable wife of 20 years who feels she has always come second to her husband’s more splendid career. Mira alone seems to worry about their daughter, Dolly (Anna Mirodin), and she seems determined to keep their marriage intact. “Don’t throw out what you have,” Mira tells him, referring both to a monologue in his script and their life together.
The play’s title refers to an element of one of Ben’s screenplays, a “Gone Girl”-ish thriller about a wife’s vanishing, and indeed Ben and Mira do battle for the rest of “The Disappear,” both as a couple — Ben’s itching to leave — and as characters, tussling over control of the show’s gait and tone. This struggle defeats the drama: Schmidt has written them as if they’re protagonists of two different plays, from two different genres. Linklater makes Ben a goggle-eyed sex-farce cliché, repulsed by his longtime spouse (“I look at you and I see my death!”) and prone to cartoonish tantrums on the carpet when he doesn’t get his way. Mira, informed by Silverman’s great warmth, is utterly different: a realistic, grown-up heroine, rediscovering her sensuality and artistic power.
These two theatrical modes never fit convincingly together, and Schmidt, directing her own work, seems caught in an existential struggle too. Should she emphasize what a conceited clown Ben is? In order for her play to operate, to validate the wistful ending she’s written, she probably shouldn’t. But she can’t resist.
As much as “The Disappear” is the story of a paragon wife being disappointed by her sulky husband, it also stages a certain combat between forms — Ben’s cinema versus Mira’s prose. Schmidt’s own career, despite a few deviations into film, is rooted in the theater. She directed a memorable production of “The Imaginary Invalid,” in 2012, at Bard University, starring her husband, Peter Dinklage, the film and television star. (Among many other projects, the two also worked together on an “Uncle Vanya,” in 2008.)
“The Disappear” contains obvious debts to both Molière and Chekhov, who wrote their own comedies of marital discord. There might be another debt here though, too, say a certain familiarity with the frustrations of Hollywood fame. Certainly Schmidt’s view of the movie world’s puffery seems acidic. Though he never says anything particularly penetrating about art, Ben is worshiped by his producer (Dylan Baker, doing his own very funny British accent) and reassured by his lead actor, Raf (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), that he’s doing wonderful work — even as Ben’s involvement with Julie creates terrible disruption on his set.
It’s unfortunate, then, that Schmidt seems to have been more influenced by film than she would like. She sometimes writes sequences into her stage directions (“She smiles to banish the tears and brushes them from her cheeks with the back of her hand. It’s very very real.”) that would, perhaps, make an impact in a close-up but are imperceptible onstage. It’s particularly awkward that she assures a reader of Ben’s charisma and Julie’s talent in these stage directions — “MUST BE CHARMING” is the last line of Ben’s character description — rather than by incorporating these qualities into either dialogue or performance.
As a theater partisan, I feel strange saying I wonder what would have happened to Schmidt’s story onscreen, but an entire valence seems to be missing here. At one point, Julie warns Ben that his movie isn’t what he thinks it is. “A loss-of-love story is still a story of love,” she tells him, which knocks him back on his heels. Once again, Ben cannot see the truth of what he’s doing. It’s odd, isn’t it? Writers can sometimes entirely misapprehend which kind of work they’re making.
The Disappear Through Feb. 22 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; audiblexminetta.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
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