On a recent bitterly cold morning, the actor Sean Hayes, the director Leigh Silverman and the playwright David Cale cozied on a banquette at the back of Julius’, the West Village bar that’s been a gay rendezvous since at least the 1960s.
They were not there for a cold beer or hot fries from the tight-squeeze grill that serves “the best hamburgers in the Village,” as the New York City Gayellow Pages put it in 1976. They were there to talk about the unknown.
Or rather “The Unknown,” Cale’s new solo show, a psychological thriller starring Hayes as a gay writer who, in an early and pivotal scene, meets a handsome but mysterious stranger over red wine at Julius’. Their flirty encounter triggers a slow-burn descent into madness, although who the characters are and who exactly is going nuts are the play’s unnerving fuel. (The Off Broadway show is in previews at Studio Seaview; opening night is Feb. 12.)
Hayes, Silverman and Cale agreed to meet at Julius’ not only because it’s in Cale’s play but also because of its significance in queer history. The bar was designated a New York City landmark in 2022 for what happened there on April 21, 1966, when members of the Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay rights group, intentionally sought to be denied service, in a challenge to the New York State Liquor Authority’s ban on serving L.G.B.T.Q. patrons.
After they had no problem getting drinks at other establishments earlier that day, the activists were denied service at Julius’ after identifying themselves as homosexuals. The aftermath of the Sip-In, as the action became known, eventually led the Authority to let gay people legally drink in bars — one of the most consequential pre-Stonewall gay protests. In 2016, Julius’ was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Cale said that other than a “very sweet” date that went nowhere, he wasn’t a Julius’ habitué. He wasn’t entirely sure why he set a scene there either, other than it provides “a little history lesson in an organic way.”
The moment “now feels important to have in a show because things are being forgotten and history is being lost,” he said.
Forgotten and lost might as well be stage directions in “The Unknown.” In 75 minutes, the piece unravels reality through a series of vignettes of unreliable narration and creepy placemaking. It’s on the thriller side of horror, a genre that the theater has long struggled to effectively translate for the stage. Musical efforts tend toward deliberately hammy (“Little Shop of Horrors”) or inadvertently camp (“Carrie”) and only occasionally genuinely macabre (“Sweeney Todd”).
Plays, especially the solo show, have fared better; Beckett, Sarah Kane and Martin McDonagh have expertly sent chills through a theater. Theatermakers keep trying: The found footage horror film “Paranormal Activity” is now a play touring the country, and the 1987 vampire film “The Lost Boys” is coming to Broadway this spring.
Cale said he was especially inspired by “Shimmer,” the playwright John O’Keefe’s 1988 monologue in which he describes escaping a harsh work home.
“I had never seen a solo show where in telling the story it got tense,” Cale said. “You’re like run, run, run, but there’s just one person onstage in this little room. That really stayed with me. I don’t know how he did it.”
Hayes, 55, an Emmy winner for “Will & Grace,” and a Tony winner for “Good Night, Oscar,” said yes to the terrors of a solo show for the first time because he’d “rather die trying.” He said this as he glanced at a photo of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli perched on the wall behind his head, one of many portraits of gay patron saints at Julius’.
Getting older, he said, “affords you the confidence to not worry about the result and accept the journey and the challenge for what it is.”
“The Unknown” checks off several boxes that will be familiar to horror movie fans: a cabin in the woods, fitful cellphone service, creepy twins, spectral visions. Cale, 67, said a cinematic inspiration was “Sudden Fear,” a 1952 film noir starring Joan Crawford, in that it moved with “boom, boom, boom” B-movie speed.
Also, Cale had a sort-of stalker who repeatedly buzzed his door in the middle of the night, which prompted the idea for “The Unknown.”
“It was somebody who was harassing me,” he said. “It’s not funny, but I really enjoy things like ‘Klute,’ Jane Fonda being chased by someone she doesn’t know. I find it exhilarating, but in reality it’s not.” (Cale said after he identified the person and threatened to go to the police, the harassment stopped.)
Also driving “The Unknown” is the vise of writer’s block, the same horror movie malady that plagues Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” and Dario Argento’s “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.” Cale said he wanted to explore the horrors of writer’s block because he knew well “what it’s like to not have any ideas, to be dependent on your imagination when you’re not getting anything.”
“That’s really frightening,” he said, “like you’re disappearing.”
“The Unknown” reunites Silverman and Cale for the third time on a show that Cale wrote but is not performing in, following “Harry Clarke” (2017) and “Sandra” (2022) — solo thrillers that explored deception, shape-shifting and how identity can be weaponized.
Since the 1980s, Cale has been writing and performing in intimate works like “Smooch Music” (1987), and later in “Deep in a Dream of You” (1993) and “Lillian” (1997). The English-born Cale credited a gay beau ideal as a spark for his career-long fascination with the sorcery it takes for a performer to grip an audience.
“The most pivotal artistic experience I ever had was in the ’70s with Bette Midler,” he said. “I felt so disconnected to everything, and seeing her six times in concert, four of them from the front row, it felt life affirming. A single person onstage made me, and the people around me, feel connected to life. I was like, I want to try and do that when I get older.”
The Tony-nominated Silverman, 51, said she and Hayes knew each other through theater circles and had been looking for a project to work on together when she sent him the first few pages of “The Unknown.”
“It was like, wait, on the second page you’re telling me a person is singing outside a house in the middle of nowhere?” he remembered thinking. “What’s going on? Where did this person come from? You start asking all these questions.”
In directing “The Unknown,” Silverman said she was inspired by Cale’s recent solo show “Blue Cowboy,” about a writer who strikes up a vexed but emotionally resonant romance with a stranger. (In her review of the show’s run last year at the Bushwick Starr, in which Cale starred, Elisabeth Vincentelli called it “masterfully written and just as masterfully performed.”)
Silverman said she hoped to infuse “The Unknown” with the same qualities that made watching “Blue Cowboy” feel like being at a film.
“I want the audience to have a movie running in their head and still be riveted to Sean, working on two tracks at the same time,” she said, adding: “The thing we’re trying to create isn’t external, it’s internal and psychological. It has to feel true. It can’t feel like style.”
As he did in “Good Night, Oscar,” in which he portrayed the troubled pianist and raconteur Oscar Levant, Hayes is flexing his dramatic chops. It’s a universe away from Jack, the sass-master sidekick he played on “Will & Grace,” although even in casual conversation Hayes can slay a room with just the word “pocket.” Hayes said the biggest challenge in “The Unknown” was differentiating the 11 characters he plays without entering “a no man’s land, where it’s like, wait, I don’t know who I’m watching or listening to.”
“You’re thinking about 10 different things while you’re speaking,” he said. “You’re thinking about the next moment but you can’t play the next moment because you’re in the current one. What’s required dialect-wise, emotionally, technically — it’s a lot.”
Silverman jumped in. “I’ve said this to Sean many times, but it’s about how little you can do to communicate the differences between the characters,” she said. “It’s about the restraint, not about the extremity.”
Hayes looked a little appreciative as he eyed the Julius’ bar stools where his character meets the stranger who upends his life. Being there, he said, was “surreal and cool and amazing,” especially since he’d only learned of the bar’s historical significance through Cale’s play.
“I’m a dumb-dumb about a lot of this,” Hayes said. “To have this experience, to call on it in my brain, is a gift. I should have done this a while ago.”
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