The dynamic between an overbearing mother and a gay son is an ever-productive area for artistic exploration. You can approach it allegorically and abstractly (just survey the career of Stephen Sondheim) or by putting the two generations onstage, sitting in chairs staring across from each other, as Cynthia Nixon and Taylor Trensch do at the start of The Seven Year Disappear. The two of them, both in black jumpsuits, face off in a mock version of The Artist Is Present up to the point where the play begins, the artifice drops, and they sit down next to each other like actual mother and son. “I am Marina ABRRRAAAMOVIĆ …†purrs Nixon’s Miriam, making fun of the woman who, we learn, is her rival performance artist. “Mom —,†interrupts Trensch’s Naphtali, “please —â€
The tension between the artist’s performance and the actual human relationship is at the center of The Seven Year Disappear. Miriam’s a fussy, micromanaging mother — she buys Naphtali a Brita pitcher and won’t stop telling him to use condoms — who also wants to be uncompromising in her art. Her son makes little acts of rebellion against her, but he also depends on her for his living since he’s her business manager. When we meet them first, in 2009, Naphtali is helping Miriam plan for a big commission from MoMA and a lot depends on Nixon and Trensch’s ability to sell you on a believable family dynamic. (His father is, crucially, out of the picture.) She’s imperious, he’s impish: They bicker and crack each other up. Establishing a level of warmth between them is crucial groundwork, because almost immediately it’s gone — a few minutes after that scene, Miriam disappears from the face of the Earth, leaving Naphtali in the dark about whether or not it’s part of an art project.
From that moment, Jordan Seavey’s play jumps all the way forward to Miriam’s return — as you might expect from the title, it happens seven years later — by which point Naphtali has, maybe, become a different person. Though the trick of the thing is that Miriam never quite disappears: In subsequent scenes, Seavey works backward, covering events between 2016 and 2009, but he instructs that the actor playing Miriam should always play the character opposite Naphtali. So, even in Miriam’s absence, Nixon is there in blocky glasses and a German accent to play Miriam’s older male ex-lover and ex-manager. And she’s there as a SoulCycle-obsessed power gay named Brayden with whom Naphtali goes on a disastrous date. And she’s there as a flibbertigibbet actress friend with a Hydro Flask who set Naphtali up on that date. Et cetera. Naphtali may insist — say, to a 17-year-old nail tech (also Nixon) who tries to engage with him on Reddit conspiracy theories about Miriam — that he’s over his mother’s disappearance, but the casting itself makes it clear she’ll never be gone from his life.
The play is, quite obviously, structured as a showcase for Nixon. Away from her TV obligations to play meek on The Gilded Age or do whatever fresh nonsense they come up with for Miranda on And Just Like That …, Nixon really commits to both her Lydia Tár–like rendering of Miriam as well as the seven other personages she takes on. Nixon’s gusto can verge into the parodical — I’m not sure what to make of the drawl she attempts while playing a DACA beneficiary named Tomás — but her “look at me having fun!†enthusiasm tends to warm the spikier corners of the play. There’s a haunting tête-à -tête, later on, in which Nixon’s a dom daddy from some app hookup offering Naphtali drugs, that because of the presence of her as an actor is all the more complicated by those feelings of parental abandonment (and Nixon gets to deliver the line “drink your G, Shelbyâ€). The set-up asks a lot of Trensch, too, whom I’ve seen mostly in musicals like Dear Evan Hansen and Camelot. He’s able to bind the self-conscious, hyperliterate, defensive sarcasm of Seavey’s dialogue (there are as many jokes about the locations of David Zwirner galleries as there are about fisting) around a core of wounded lost-boy abandonment.
It’s a pity, however, whenever Seavey relocates us to Miriam’s return in 2016, that director Scott Elliott has both Nixon and Trensch amped up to 11, in extended shouting matches that dull the effect of the drama. Elliot’s taken a maximal approach to the staging that, piled on top of Seavey’s already maximal script, makes less out of more. Trensch and Nixon perform some scenes while being recorded for the video screens that fill Derek McLane’s austerely sleek set. That gesture, at least, creates some intimacy in that scene with Nixon as a daddy, as the actors lie on a bed off in the corner of the stage while their faces are present right in front of us. But more often, the bells and whistles come off as a winky pastiche of self-serious performance art. Screens tend to compete for attention with actors, and here I kept getting distracted by the cutely clever mockups of artwork — especially one composite image of Nixon and Trensch’s faces that lingers behind the two of them — when I wanted to be paying more attention to them.
Those effects lay a lot of extra filigree on top of Seavey’s already rangy script. Seavey’s breakout play Homos, or Everyone in America, at LAByrinth in 2016, was another two-hander that bounced around in time, capturing the effect of a gay relationship fractured by an act of violence. In The Seven Year Disappear, he seems to want to cover everything in America again, only through a mother-son lens, so he bites off more than the play can chew and then bites some more. Miriam’s disappearance covers almost all of the Obama era as well as the night of Trump’s election, since she conveniently returns in late November 2016. So Seavey has Naphtali get a job on Hillary’s campaign, allowing him to explore how a certain type of Establishment cis gay guy of that era tended to treat Clinton as a sort of surrogate mommy (and then became all the more disillusioned when Mommy didn’t win). That’s an interesting take, but it doesn’t get space to mature into a deeper inquiry, because the play, which has only one 90-minute act, is just crowded. He has addiction on the mind, as well as art-world satire, as well as the long arm of AIDS trauma, as well as the eternal queer debate over assimilation, as well as the questions of intergenerational war/co-dependence. The spirits of Kushner and Kramer are strong in him (let Seavey run loose over an epic!), and it’s energizing to see a work that launches itself so freely into a jeremiad or two, but the direction is also amped up and The Seven Year Disappear keeps overflowing its container, like a full pot of stew on too high a boil.
It’s at its best when Nixon and Trensch turn the temperature down and return to that essential mother-son reckoning. Near the end, when they have a chance to play the softer aspects of that dynamic, you get all the sense of old wounds as well as mutual admiration and resentment and a faltering attempt and moving forward. You can apply all sorts of interpretations over that: one generation making peace with the damage wrought by the one that came before, a new kind of queer family, perhaps even another kind of performance. But it’s also just a lovely scene of two particular, damaged individuals making peace by seeing each other as such.
The Seven Year Disappear is at the Pershing Square Signature Center through March 31.