WTF?

That is how Sean Hayes as Elliott reacts at a startling moment in this 75-minute solo play, and how Hayes as Larry, Elliot’s best friend, reacts to Elliott’s increasingly obsessive behavior. It’s also how I reacted to the final twist in “The Unknown,” a thriller by David Cale that opened tonight at Studio Seaview

If the ending in particular made little sense to me, I’m not sure how much logically the rest of the play holds up under scrutiny either. Yet logic be damned: “The Unknown” plays masterfully from moment to moment with audience expectations. Sean Hayes portrays eleven distinctly different characters with what feels like effortless clarity, even as the story becomes ever-more clouded and convoluted. 

“The Unknown” is the third time that Cale, normally a downtown monologuist who performs his own material, has produced a solo show for another actor to perform, each of them in the thriller genre, and all of them collaborations with director Leigh Silverman. The first of these was “Harry Clarke,” in 2017, when Billy Crudup portrayed a Midwestern con man reinventing himself as a British charmer, which ends with a disturbing question: How much has his fake identity overtaken his real one? This latest play goes deeper into the genre. We wind up questioning what’s reality, 

At the start, Elliot tells us that he is a successful gay writer who had been paralyzed by writer’s block for weeks when Larry and Chloe  offered him a solo stay in the couple’s isolated cabin in upstate New York, free of distractions – no Internet, no phone service.

The night Elliott arrives, resting in their bed, he hears a voice outside the house singing 

“I wish you’d wanted me
How different life would be…”

That’s a song that Elliott himself had composed for a musical he wrote years ago “Lover’s Way.” He is unable to find out who is singing, and the voice starts coming from different directions.

If this were a straightforward horror movie, the plot might have unfolded entirely in this haunted cabin in the woods, with Elliott trapped inside. But instead, he high-tails it back to the city the next morning. Two days later, he finds the lyrics of that same song taped to his mailbox in his apartment building in Greenwich Village.

I don’t know how much more I should tell you.  I’ll try to be vague. There are twins involved. There is a scene in Julius’s, a landmark gay bar in the Village, which includes a digression into the historical significance of that bar. Something I can’t leave out: Elliott (who, remember, is struggling to end his writer’s block) pitches the unsettling story that he’s living in real time to two film producers, who like the idea, and wonder if Jude Law could play one of the leads. This hints at metatheatrical goings-on, serves as Cale’s light jab at himself as well as at the industry,  and also offers a motive however thin for Elliott to take actions — half detective, half thrill-seeker, half provocateur– that are otherwise inexplicably reckless. He wants to live through and then write about a story that would interest Jude Law.

Would  “The Unknown” interest Jude Law?  Only, it seems to me, if he’s willing to perform it on stage.  This is a trickster’s play, in a production with almost no set, but Cha See’s oblique lighting and Caroline Eng’s sound enhancing the tension and the teasing; scarier, or at least creepier, because it is live.

The Unknown
Studio Seaview through April 12
Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $99 – $299
Written by David Cale
Directed by Leigh Silverman
Scenic design by Studio Bent, costume design by Sarah Laux, lighting design by Cha See, sound design by Caroline Eng, music by Isobel Waller-Bridge. 
Cast: Sean Hayes