The Brooklyn Rail

Jordan Seavey’s first major New York production came easily enough.

“All I had to do,” he recalled telling a friend at the time, “was rip off my skin.”

The play, Homos, or Everyone in America, debuted at LAByrinth Theater Company’s since-shuttered West Village home, the Bank Street Theater, in October 2016. It traced a fractious gay romance through a fragmented, non-chronological structure.

The central couple, referred to only as The Writer and The Academic, struggle through questions of monogamy and sexual freedom in a time of increasing gay cultural assimilation—before that illusion of acceptance is shattered by a horrific hate crime. While not directly autobiographical, Homos drew on Seavey’s own life, including an attack suffered by an ex-boyfriend. Critics raved. Tony Kushner went and “loved” both the play and the production, the Angels in America playwright told the Brooklyn Rail, declaring it among the best of the year.

For Seavey, the production followed thirteen years in the new play development grind. To break through, he joked, he just had to mine his own trauma and put it on public display.

“That’s not unique to me,” Seavey said. “It sounds dramatic, but… you gotta bleed a little bit.”

His newest play, The Seven Year Disappear, explores the depths artists will plunge to mine their own life for art.

Stage legend and Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon plays Miriam, a celebrated performance artist (think Marina Abramović, though Miriam would reject the comparison) who goes missing just before the launch of a new residency at MoMA. As her disappearance stretches on, her longtime manager and, perhaps secondarily, her son, Naphtali (Taylor Trensch), realizes that Miriam’s absence is itself her latest piece—and he its unwitting participant. The play runs at The Pershing Square Signature Center through March 24 in a New Group production.

“Miriam will do anything to make a piece of art that she believes has to exist,” said Seavey. “I have a bit of that, and my version is processing life events and emotions in a very stylized, very public way.”

Disappear continues Seavey’s penchant for scattered chronologies. The play begins with Miriam’s eventual return, then moves backwards in time. During her absence, Naphtali’s life crumbles. He struggles to stay sober, works a doomed position in LGBTQ outreach for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and pursues an ill-advised affair with his mother’s frequent collaborator, Wolfgang.

Nixon also plays Wolfgang, along with every other character that passes through Naphtali’s life, from a closeted seventeen-year-old manicurist to a brash private detective. Onstage, through all the years of her absence, Miriam is always there.

The central question of “the sacrifices that the artist makes to express what they need to express” intrigued New Group artistic director Scott Elliott, who is also directing. “Jordan wrote a story about his relationship to art, through this mother character.”

Seavey’s own mother was an artist (she did not, he noted quickly, abandon him for seven years). After receiving a Fulbright to study mime in France, she worked as a professional clown while raising Seavey in Sheepshead Bay. Amidst a painful divorce, she shifted into teaching by the time Seavey was ten, unable to financially sustain performing full-time while raising a child.

Seavey attended Boston University’s College of Fine Arts for undergrad, writing and putting up shows with a troupe of fellow students. They eventually formed into the devised theater company CollaborationTown.

“The first time I ever saw Jordan, he was wearing a black shirt, black dance pants, and a black derby hat, and he was juggling pins,” said the playwright and performer Boo Killebrew, one of the co-founders of C-Town. “I was like: ‘Who is that?’”

After a decidedly ambitious senior thesis show (an adaptation of Dante’s Inferno), the company immediately moved to New York to stage Seavey’s media satire This is a Newspaper, which the New York International Fringe had accepted for its 2003 festival. Then they kept on going for seventeen years.

Most shows were devised by the whole company, but C-Town produced two of Seavey’s own works: 6969, a psychodrama set entirely in online chatrooms, at 59E59 Theaters in 2007; and Children at Play, a dark comedy about outcast adolescents, at the Living Theatre (also now closed) in 2009.

Meanwhile, Seavey was pursuing every major development opportunity he could find. Some of his plays opened doors: The Truth Will Out, a fiery condemnation of Anderson Cooper’s glass closet, got him into the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group in 2009. Productions were a greater hurdle.

Much of Seavey’s work was unabashedly gay, with frank discussions of fisting, poppers, and anal sex, which, even now, are likely to make some audiences squirm in their seats. But perhaps the greater challenge was his confrontational politics.

“I was a very self-righteous, angry young gay,” Seavey said. The Truth Will Out was about a gay teenager locking himself into his headmaster’s office with a gun, calling into the news show of a Cooper-like presenter, and threatening to kill himself unless the anchor came out on air. Practically every company in New York was “excited by” The Truth Will Out at some point, he said. None took the leap.

“Writing from personal experience scares theater companies less than a twenty-eight-year-old me railing against closeted celebrities,” he said. He has accepted the need to filter politics through the personal, but still has mixed feelings about it, adding: “If we’re not talking about the recent past in the political sense, then what are we doing in theater?”

Not that Homos lacked political potency. The hate crime at its center took on a shocking relevance when, a few weeks after opening, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

“That was a moment,” recalled then-LAByrinth artistic director Mimi O’Donnell, “where I really felt how necessary theater is.”

And while Disappear is less overtly political, Seavey viewed Miriam’s vanishing act as a metaphor for the liberal “disappear,” which, he argues, followed the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008.

“We had this enormous success and took this huge step that many people thought, for good reason, would never happen,” said Seavey. “Then we all kind of went to sleep.”

That push and pull around Seavey’s outspoken politics came up again in Disappear rehearsals. He faced pushback for a scene in which Naphtali goes on a disastrous date with a curator from MoMA who, it is revealed, voted for Trump. Collaborators questioned the likelihood that a high-level MoMA administrator would be a MAGA Republican.

Seavey ultimately cut the Trump element from the scene, but still had mixed feelings about it.

“These people do exist,” Seavey said.

Elliott’s production of Disappear utilizes Miriam’s work as a meta-theatrical framing device, placing us inside of her art through projections and video elements. Seavey had imagined a more minimalist approach, but they came to this framing collaboratively. He noted that, given the strange device of every person in Naphtali’s life wearing Miriam’s face, the play could be staged in “twenty different ways by twenty different directors.”

As to the potentially charged question of a mother leaving their child, the playwright and director are prepared for strong reactions.

“Of course the character is a narcissist,” said Elliott. Her work “ignites her in a way that makes her unable to do anything except the art, and without the art, she can’t mother, or be a wife, or be anything else.”

“There are very good people who either are not good parents, or make horrible mistakes in parenthood,” said Seavey. “This play is about one of those people.”

Naphtali ultimately proves unable to resist the allure of participating in Miriam’s piece and, like his mother—and like Seavey—processing his pain through public spectacle.

“You see him struggle so much, and in so many ways he’s not okay,” said Seavey. “But he makes the piece.”

“And then,” he added wryly, “he never has to write a piece about trauma, or addiction, or violence again.”