Narrators are inherently tricky figures. There’s something furtive and insinuating about them, especially when they speak in the first person. What if the narrator starts lying? Is the narrator-self consistently one self? Surrealist detective fiction excels at exploiting this Möbius-strip confusion — an investigator might go looking for a murderer, say, only to find out that he’s the one who dunnit.
Last century was full of such metaphysical sleuthery, from G.K. Chesterton (“The Man Who Was Thursday”) to Eugene Ionesco (“The Killer”) to Geoff Dyer (“The Search”). That might be why David Cale’s slippery new monologue, “The Unknown,” performed by Sean Hayes at Studio Seaview, feels timeless — we have seen this story’s end in its beginning.
A red curtain swishes aside to reveal an unadorned stage. Hayes is discovered in profile, wearing a slouchy blue jacket, with his hand to his forehead. Voilà! A writer, exhausted. Hayes, for the most part, speaks as Elliott, a journeyman playwright and screenwriter with a shrug in his voice. “I don’t know,” he says. “When writers talk about having writer’s block, I always rolled my eyes. But I was having trouble writing.”
In Elliott’s tale, friends offer him a remote upstate writing retreat, but on his first night, he hears a man outside, a mysterious intruder singing a song from one of Elliott’s own musicals. “I wish you’d wanted me,” a male voice croons, flitting across the theater, sometimes settling uncomfortably close to my left ear. This sleight-of-sound (designed by Caroline Eng, with music composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge) operates as our warning that Elliott’s world is ours: It’s going to worm its way in, delusion or not.
Elliott flees back to New York, but the more he evades this stalker, the more he finds him. At his local New York drinking spot, the 162-year-old gay bar Julius’, a sweet-natured Texan strikes up a conversation; it would rouse anyone’s suspicions … other than a writer hungry for content and contact. Hayes’s chameleonic voice drawls and swings as writer and stranger seduce each other, and Elliott eventually finds that phrase — “I wish you’d wanted me” — written in surprising places. Men turn out to be other men, or turn out to be twins, or turn out to be characters from other plays, as Elliott pursues his suitor-tormentor across the city. He chases him long enough that the pursuit makes him, paradoxically, a kind of predator.
The director Leigh Silverman treats the set (designed by Studio Bent) like a noir soundstage, filling it with hard-edge shadows (Cha See designed the lights) and banks of fog-like smoke. The primary quality, though, is sound. “The Unknown” is hypnotic, which is another way of saying that its pleasures are very quiet ones. I felt like I was listening to radio drama on a rainy night, or as if someone were reading me a familiar story, but I’d forgotten the ending. Waller-Bridge’s dreamy music sounds as though it’s coming from another room, and it’s only when Cale deploys certain haptic details — Hayes describes the spare keys to Elliott’s apartment, stuck with a magnet to his fridge — that the evening takes on momentary weight.
Hayes takes to this material as if it were written for him. He’s vocally flexible, playing several characters, but he also has an intriguing way of gradating warmth, so that we ignore Elliott’s poor choices (and spiraling sanity) for longer than we should. Here he’s also doing a sly imitation of Cale, a writer-actor who often performs his pieces himself.
There’s an interrogative lilt that I associate with Cale, who played a different — I assume? — writer in his recent solo “Blue Cowboy,” at the Bushwick Starr. In that monologue, which shared many characteristics with “The Unknown,” the writer’s quest for a retreat led him up into the Idaho hills, where a sad-eyed cowpoke slid into his life and bed. Hayes-as-Elliott strikes the same note of diffidence that Cale did when men show erotic interest; his extreme self-effacement can be both a little shy and a little much.
How much this coyness intrigued me and how much it annoyed me shifted, a bit like Silverman’s drifting sheets of fog. The show is not long, but even in just 75 minutes, I had time to feel as though my own mental pursuit of Elliott occasionally wore thin, and that mystification was not, always, the same as profundity. Are these waters deep? Or are they just dark? Those thoughts surfaced, rather like one of Waller-Bridge’s elusive melodies.
Still, Hayes always summoned me back into Elliott’s whirlpool mind. “I wish you wanted me,” he says, describing, elliptically, the way that the storyteller and his audience yearn for each other. Which I? Which me? While I was busy thinking about that, I felt us all go down into the vortex together.
The Unknown Through April 12 at the Studio Seaview, Manhattan; studioseaview.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.
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