Theatre review: The Unseen

Valdez: “Is this what you think about when we're not talking?”
Wallace: “No, this is what I think about when you're talking.”


The Unseen is a Kafkaesque (and, one imagines, Guantanamo-esque) drama, set in an unnamed political prison. Two prisoners, Wallace and Valdez, are daily and systematically beaten and tortured. They’ve been there for ten years, held without being charged with any crime. They have no valuable information to offer, and indeed, the guards stopped asking them for information years ago, simply torturing them and then sending them back to their respective cells. Their sole comfort in life is talking to each other through the wall; they’ve never laid eyes on each other, or for that matter, on anyone in the prison other than the aptly-named guard, Smash.

Wallace and Valdez manage to keep from going insane by weaving elaborate fantasies and speculating as to the actual nature of the prison. How is it constructed? How many other people are being held prisoner? Is there a third prisoner in the cell between theirs? Smash has his own spiritual and psychological issues with the regular cycle of pain and torture, though he is more immune to it than he thinks. Ultimately his feeble conscience wins out, enabling a meeting for Wallace and Valdez in a completely unexpected way.

The small cast does an excellent job, especially Thomas Ward as Smash. He has just enough doubt and fear to be dangerous; any less, and he’d be a soulless automaton. His brutal physicality, full of yelling and stomping and spitting, is the perfect backdrop for his limited sort of moral exploration. Sarah Brown’s set is somewhat loftier than you’d expect for a prison, but still a fine embodiment of the endless twists and turns Wright mentions.

My only quibble with the production is that it is far more concerned with the particularities of daily prison life than the subject matter would suggest. Kafka’s The Castle, for instance, worked largely because there were no particularities—the lack of detail, of specificity, both made the tale more maddening and more universal, because any regime/government/bureaucracy could be seen to fit. The same holds true for other existential works, like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The Unseen has that same maddening lack of specificity; we don’t know any more about the prisoners’ crimes or fates than they know. But director Lisa Denman has chosen to highlight the few details that exist in the prison—the seemingly random buzzers, the tin plates and spoons, the lighting, the pattern of stonework, the bloody work that precedes Smash’s inarticulate rage. The actors, too, channel their search for detail into Wright’s precise language; trapped as the characters are, the actors aren’t able to explore any range of motion, other than Wallace’s fiddling with random scrounged objects and Valdez’s aimless wandering. This makes the play less a commentary on political prisoners and the corruption of power than a simple story of two men who have largely given up. It’s a fine story, to be sure, but this production lacks the broader context the script hints at.


Written by Craig Wright
Directed by Lisa Denman
With Steven Pounders (Wallace), Stan Denman (Valdez), and Thomas Ward (Smash)
Set Design: Sarah Brown
Lighting Design: Travis Watson
Costume Design: Carl Booker
Sound Design: Dustin Chaffin
Running Time: 85 minutes with no intermission
Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street; 212-239-6200
Tickets $45
Tuesdays through Sunday at 8 pm, Saturdays at 2 pm, Sundays at 3 pm
March 5th – 28th, 2009