For Oscar’s family, the people he left behind when he vanished, the most excruciating pain comes from his absence. A close second is the torment of not knowing what happened to him — whether someone harmed him, or he had an accident, or, at 15, he chose to run away. Maybe his parents’ recent split is to blame?
Nick Payne’s quiet vigil of a play, “The Unbelievers,” takes place in the aftermath of Oscar’s disappearance, hopscotching through time: mere hours, or one year, or seven years later. Directed by Knud Adams for Manhattan Theater Club, this wry British drama does not belong to the current trend of horror-genre shows — including “2:22: A Ghost Story,” more on which is below — yet as it worms its way into the audience’s viscera, “The Unbelievers” is more realistically frightening than any of those others.
Holding the family’s center even as she falls apart is Oscar’s brash, funny, devastated mother, Miriam. The superb Lauren Ambrose plays her like a woman at sea, frantically swimming — exhausted, disoriented, barely afloat but undeterred. She is the one we see, as the performance starts at New York City Center Stage 1, lighting a candle that will glow beside a window through much of what follows. Too tenacious to be skeptical, Miriam unfailingly checks out every supposed Oscar sighting that random crackpots send her way.
She tells Nancy (Nina Ross) and Margaret (Elizabeth Yeoman), Oscar’s older siblings, “I want to make sure that your brother knows that we never, ever, not even once, gave up.”
This, rather than any stripe of spirituality, is Miriam’s faith. As the anguish of her loving, messy, extremely likable family deepens, trappings of the supernatural find a place in their search for solace. But Miriam and David (Tom Riley), Oscar’s father, are both atheists. The churchy elements of Paul Steinberg’s handsome set, which puts a stained-glass window on one side of the auditorium and several rows of wooden church pews onstage for audience seating, have more to do with metaphor than with actual religion.
Adams, so deft with actors, has assembled an accomplished cast to play these British characters. Marjan Neshat does double duty, radiating warmth as a police liaison officer and as David’s partner, Lorraine. Her accent is distractingly shaky, though. Better to drop it altogether.
“The Unbelievers” is about trauma and the damage it does. Payne staggers the chronology, blurring the edges between scenes that take place years apart: no blackouts, no transitions. Masha Tsimring’s lighting is often the main clue that time has shifted. It’s disorienting, but it’s also true to the disjointed way that trauma can sit in memory. Payne takes that jumbled quality a step too far toward the end, giving Miriam a rush of a monologue that is simply too forced to work — but that, in this thoughtful, deliberate production, does not damage the gentle ending, either.
That’s where the play slows way down and lets us feel the heaviness of real time, and how much of it has passed for these people since they have seen their boy.
Another British play, Danny Robins’s “2:22: A Ghost Story,” at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village, is also concerned with fear for a child. Little Phoebe is 11 months old, and for four nights, blood-chilling sounds have been coming from her bedroom at exactly 2:22 a.m. Her mother, Jenny (an impeccable Jasmine Cephas Jones), is convinced that their house, under renovation in a recently gentrified London neighborhood, has a ghost.
So when her physicist husband, Sam (Finn Jones), returns home from a trip, she urges him and their dinner guests — the manic Lauren (Anna Camp), who has been unrequitedly in love with Sam since their college days, and her new partner, Ben (a wonderfully derisive Martin Marquez) — to stay up with her until 2:22. Jenny wants witnesses to the specter haunting the place, walking menacing circles around the baby’s crib.
Directed by Matthew Dunster and Gabriel Vega Weissman, “2:22” is one of the more adroit horror plays onstage in New York. The cast is terrific, and with the complex dynamics of this foursome’s fractious gathering — relationship tensions, class resentment, Sam’s aggressively pompous jerkishness — we have more than enough to distract us from whatever is really going on, spooky-wise.
Plus the foxes outside the house are prone to loud, ungodly screeching. (The set is by Anna Fleischle; sound design is by Ian Dickinson for Autograph.) Phoebe must be a miracle baby to sleep through both the foxes and the ruckus that the grown-ups make downstairs. The adults’ chronic unconcern about the possibility of waking her gnawed repeatedly at my suspension of disbelief.
Still, with a vigil, a séance and jump scares that are the fun kind of frightening, this show is an entertaining ride. It doesn’t so much tap into primal fears as use them for playthings.
2:22: A Ghost Story Through Jan. 17 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; lortel.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.
The Unbelievers Through Nov. 29 at the Manhattan Theater Club, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
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