It’s the latest theatrical trend: You walk in, and the actors are already onstage, where they sit, silently, as audience members file in (and as they snap and Instagram photos of said actors). But in the case of The New Group’s The Seven Year Disappear, the pre-show setup—which seats the two actors, Taylor Trensch (recently Mordred in Camelot) and two-time Tony winner (Rabbit Hole, The Little Foxes) Cynthia Nixon at opposite ends of a long table—it feels part of the play.
Nixon plays Miriam, a renowned performance artist; Trench is Naphtali (Hebrew for “my struggle, my strife”), her son, manager, and well-known, often unwilling, participant in her pieces. Is this preshow stare-down the start of a new Miriam installation? Diehard Sex and the City fans will surely recall the season 6 episode where Carrie and Charlotte visit a Chelsea gallery to see a woman sitting silently as a metronome ticks the seconds away.
But we don’t learn much about Miriam, other than that she does a so-so Marina Abramović impression. (“I swear she thinks she’s the fucking mother of durational performance art,” sighs Miriam.) Playwright Jordan Seavey (Homos, or Everyone in America) immediately sends her away for seven years—but tells us nothing of her absence—and spends the rest of the 90-minute play ping-ponging between 2009, 2016, and various years between. Though all the years are projected onto a screen, some transitions are harder to follow than others; blame it on John Narun’s terrific projections, which incorporate what are presumably photos of Miriam’s works throughout the years (his use of filters, crops, and shading is entrancing).
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Since there are so few actual Miriam appearances, Nixon gets to play every other character. She uses thick black glasses and a vaguely German accent to play Wolfgang, Naphtali’s surrogate father turned on-again-off-again six-year hookup (not to mention Miriam’s ex-lover); she pops on a baseball cap and slouches carelessly as Tomás, Naph’s coworker on the Clinton campaign, who derides Hillary’s “embrace of this ridiculous Katy Perry kind of ‘just love yourself!—we are all unicorns!—homophobia-is-over!’ bullshit” (this does not go over well with LGBTQ liaison Naphtali); she pops in a nose ring and adopts the disaffected tone of a teenager and becomes LaGuardia High School art student/part-time manicurist Kaitlyn who “might be gay too, maybe” and is a major fan of Miriam (“Your mom’s such a bad ass I mean unless she’s dead or abducted or something”).
There’s also a famous actress, a blind date, a drug-dealing bishop…and she does it all without a single costume change. (Qween Jean has dressed both Nixon and Trensch in plain black coveralls and chunky black boots.) And when she does appear as Miriam—desperately pleading with her issue-ridden son to participate in her “pièce de resistance”— Nixon is larger than life.
“Our democracy just elected a tyrant. He’s out to destroy the Constitution. Take a look at the America that’s coming,” she yells. Of course she’s right. Yes, it could happen again. But it sounds a little too preachy. Also: Tomás’ rant about Hillary being “a two-faced bitch”…are we still going there? And Naphtali’s naive line “Under what circumstances could she possibly lose?” feels like a cheap laugh.
But after watching Nixon playing such weak-willed (but well-dressed) TV women—Miranda on And Just Like That… and Ada on The Gilded Age—it’s a thrill to see her as the uncompromising Miriam. Incidentally, it’s been seven years since her last New York City stage appearance (The Little Foxes). Let’s hope she doesn’t, well, disappear for so long next time.
The Seven Year Disappear opened February 25, 2024, at Signature Center and runs through March 31. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
