Disappeared
A mystery lurks at the heart of Disappeared, but it’s not the one the playwright intended. Phyllis Nagy’s 1995 play is a kind of philosophical thriller-cum-murder mystery. One night a curious man in an ill-fitting suit appears in a Hell’s Kitchen bar, ready to chat with anyone about anything. The only other customer that night is the perpetually pickled Sarah Casey, lip-synching to the Turtles and dancing about in an attempt to forget her miserable life. The stranger introduces himself first as an entertainment attorney and then as a serial killer. Something about him–perhaps his gentle manner, perhaps his professed desire to escape to a faraway land–draws Sarah in.
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And everything in Roadworks’ spectacular opening scene draws us in. Designer Geoffrey M. Curley has transformed Steppenwolf’s usually intimate studio theater into what looks like a football-field-sized attic, the huge stage seeming to rest on stacks of old newspapers. Yet the starlike bare bulbs strung up behind the translucent back wall suggest a cosmological intelligence presiding over everything. Andre Pluess and Benjamin Sussman’s sound design, combining distant city noise with cool jazz, creates an atmosphere of pulp-fiction intrigue.
But like most other elements of the play, Elston’s philosophical deliberations never evolve. He’s an oddity, not a dramatic catalyst–a serious problem for a character planted at the center of a story. Nagy tries to dramatize his impact on those around him; the police detective reveals the depth of his misery while he investigates Elston, and the attorney whose suit Elston wore in the bar becomes obsessively concerned that somehow he might have had something to do with Sarah’s disappearance. But these underdeveloped, unconvincing subplots seem mere decorations strung up to give the play texture.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): theater still by Phil Kohlmetz.
