Erica Schmidt’s 'The Disappear' blends farce and drama at Minetta Lane

Erica Schmidt’s play The Disappear opened Thursday at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan. In a review, Helen Shaw calls the production a discordant midlife-crisis comedy starring Hamish Linklater and Miriam Silverman that intentionally confuses setting and tone. The set, by Brett J.

Banakis, begins as a shadowy, library-like country interior with a peripheral yard of pale grasses, a mise-en-scène that briefly suggests Chekhov before contemporary life arrives in the person of Silverman’s polished, modern Mira. Linklater’s Ben is introduced as an anguished artist flinging himself about furniture, and the play soon establishes itself as a domestic farce about artists and ego.

Shaw reports that Ben is a filmmaker obsessed with his process and a new actress, Julie (Madeline Brewer), while Mira is a gifted novelist and Ben’s patient wife of 20 years who worries about their daughter Dolly (Anna Mirodin). The play’s title refers to an element of Ben’s screenplay about a wife’s vanishing; Ben and Mira fight both as spouses and as characters, and Shaw says Schmidt has written them as if they belong to two different plays — a cartoonish sex-farce for Ben and a realistic drama for Mira.

The review says those theatrical modes never fit convincingly and that Schmidt, who directs her own work, seems torn about emphasis. Shaw also criticizes stage directions that read like film close-ups and notes Schmidt’s theatrical background, including previous productions with Peter Dinklage.

Key Topics

Culture, The Disappear, Erica Schmidt, Minetta Lane Theater, Hamish Linklater, Miriam Silverman