Review: ‘The Seven Year Disappear’
Monique Carboni
The Seven Year Disappear, an experimental fever dream about “children and art” from The New Group, opened Monday night at The Pershing Square Signature Center. The year is 2009 and artist/manager Naphtali (Taylor Trensch) has just secured a deal with the Museum of Modern Art to commission a piece by renowned performance artist Miriam (Cynthia Nixon), his largest client- I mean his mother. Miriam vanishes for the next seven years to create her magnum opus, yet she remains visible in the faces of Naphtali’s lovers, friends, and colleagues. Nixon portrays the seven other characters.
Playwright Jordan Seavey constructs a unique casting device that dramatizes the longterm impact of parenthood, or lack thereof, on children. Miriam is present for Naphthali’s each and every move (or at least the memory of her is present). Naphtali can’t seem to grow as individual without the images and sounds of his mother following behind him - a credit to scenic designer Derek McLane and projection designer John Narun.
Seavey has built a nonlinear timeline of flashbacks and flashforwards, always shifting our perception of time. Suddenly, we’re thrust into 2016: Naphtali has given up his own artistic pursuits to join Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and Miriam has returned from her hiatus. Miriam’s now complaining about a Brita pitcher she gifted her son seven years ago as if not a day has passed. It’s rather disassociating. Only an added accessory or quick shift in dialect alerts us that Miriam is no longer Miriam (…or is she?) Is The Seven Year Disappear simply the MoMA presentation of Miriam’s piece? How meta is this thing?
Through the hodgepodge of vignettes, we learn that Naphtali and Miriam’s relationship is primarily one of business. Less affection, more transaction. Before disappearing, Naphtali had managed Miriam’s career and participated in much of her work. She even lost him in the Bronx Zoo as a child! You see, Naphtali suffers from some serious Mommy Issues (not to mention the Daddy Issues too.)
Monique Carboni
Directed by founder and artistic director of The New Group Scott Elliot, the stage is filled with imagination. We see distorted video projections of Nixon and Trensch, hear ASMR-like whispered dialogue from standing microphones, watch quirky scene transitions, and experience fourth-wall breaks. It’s packed full, perhaps cluttered, with stuff. Seavey’s text is interested in abandonment and all of the triggers that fuel this type of isolation. Addiction. Drugs. Dating. Sex. Alcoholism. AIDS. The 2016 election. Competition between artists. Family dysfunction. Memory. It’s too much for the 90-minute runtime to handle.
What the play lacks in focus Nixon and Trensch make up in their performances. Their mother-son dynamic (with all the chaos such a relationship entails) feels genuine. We believe Naphtali’s intense desire for motherly love and we can sympathize Miriam’s endless chase for the adrenaline rush that is her work. Coincidentally, The Seven Year Disappear marks Nixon’s return to the stage after a seven-year break. HBO’s And Just Like That and The Gilded Age keep the Tony Award winner’s schedule busy.
My qualm is that neither myself nor the play can decide if it’s a tongue-in-cheek parody of elitist performance art or if this unconventional aesthetic is being used as sincere storytelling. Are we supposed to be laughing at these showy gimmicks or “oohing and aahing”? It has the ambition of an Angels in America, but the execution grounds it to a character study. Regardless, it’s a display of a style we don’t often see. The Seven Year Disappear offers enough stimulus to keep us thinking, but not enough to fill all the various voids the play aims to explore.