There are very few things that Wallace and Valdez know for sure. They've been imprisoned by a totalitarian regime whose aims are unclear. They're in a prison that's entirely confounding—perhaps labyrinthine, perhaps very simple. They're tortured mercilessly and just erratically enough to keep them disoriented, even after their ten years of incarceration. In the humiliation and confusion of their days, they don't even have the simplest comfort of human connection: They 're held on the same hall, with an empty cell between them. In their decade of incarceration, they 've never seen each other. In fact, they 've never seen another human face except that of the low-level guard who brings them food, mild physical abuse and occasional inadvertent news from the world, for which he in turn is ruthlessly tortured by agents of this same anonymous power structure.

 Each man takes to this radical uncertainty differently, and their different stances are thrown into relief when Valdez believes that a prisoner has been put in the cell between them. As the two men debate what's out there in the darkness, what it might mean, and what, if anything, they might do with that understanding, Craig Wright spins a contemporary and darkly humorous story on the nature of faith and of human connection in The Unseen. Ultimately, both Valdez and Wallace have to conjecture about the world they live in; there's not enough incontestable information to construct an entire world. Wright reflects: "Wallace says, 'All that's plain as day is that we're brought here against our will, and we're continually tortured and starved.' All that's plain as day in this life is we're here and we die. Everything else is a story. Like Joan Didion says, 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.'' So it's not that stories don't matter, it's not that they're small potatoes, but other than we happen to be here and we don't get to stay, I don't know what else conclusive there really is to say, other than 'Do you need help?'' or 'I'm scared.''

And beyond the world of the prison and torture, the meaning or non-meaning of the person who may be in an unseen cell, it's these human-sized concerns that lie at the heart of Wright's work. The world of The Unseen, much like the contemporary world, is a harsh one; it's enough work to take care of ourselves, much less to reach out to people who structure the world in a fundamentally different way. As Wright puts it: "In a multicultural, religiously diverse world where there's no way to ignore the fact that there are billions of people who don't think what you believe is true, it becomes radically obvious that the work of being human together suddenly has less to do with proving our claims and more to do with listening to each other's claims, and looking not for the truth in any of it, but looking for that moment of awareness where we realize we're on the same journey. That's the trick: It's not that we don't have the same answers; we don't even have the same questions! But we do have a few things in common."

We live in a world of unclear signals, missing facts and conflicting visions of God. Craig Wright leaves us with the twin impulses of storytelling and compassion as we orient ourselves towards each other and the unseen, unknowable world beyond. "I don't know what divine means, " says Wright, "and I don't know what secular means. Every time you break it into these dualisms, all of a sudden you're barking like a dog and taking sides. I don't believe in another life after this one. I believe pretty firmly that there's only one thing happening here and there's only one material —it's not that that we're flesh and also spirit; we're all one thing—I think if we start with those beliefs and walk out in any direction, the world makes a lot of sense all of a sudden."

— Adrien-Alice Hansel

This article originally appeared in the Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2007 Humana Festival.

Location

Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce Street
NY, NY (Map)