In the new play “The Seven Year Disappear,” Cynthia Nixon plays a famous performance artist named Miriam, who vanishes just as she’s about to announce her next big piece.
She leaves behind her son and manager Naphtali, played by Taylor Trensch. Miriam stays away for seven years, and when she returns, she finds her son is a very different person.
Everyone Naphtali interacts with in this play — his mother, lovers and friends — is played by Nixon, who shapeshifts from character to character.
The play was written by Jordan Seavey and is staged like a performance piece, with video cameras, portraits and standing mics utilized throughout.
“All Of It” guest host Kousha Navidar spoke with Nixon, Trensch and playwright Seavey about “The Seven Year Disappear.” An edited version of their conversation is below.
Kousha Navidar: This play is about art and family. What role did art play in your life growing up?
Cynthia Nixon: So my mother had been an actress — not a successful actress — but she’d gone to Yale Drama School. Paul Newman was one of her classmates. And she studied with Uta Hagen, and then she tried really hard to be an actress for like, 15 years, and just did not have any success. She finally gave it up and decided that if she wasn’t going to have that in her life, she was going to have a kid, and she had me.
So I was taken to Shakespeare in the Park from age 6 on. We were a musical comedy household, you know, Sondheim all the time, Rodgers and Hammerstein all the time. We would spend a lot of time going to plays and also seeing films and kind of dissecting them and figuring out what worked and what didn’t work. So this story is very familiar to me.
Jordan, what’s something you really wanted to satirize about performance art and performance artists?
Jordan Seavey: I didn’t necessarily set out to satirize. I think art world satire is a bit baked in. Also, I love art and I love theater. I’m also in art and theater and it’s really hard to make new art. The…
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