Hamish Linklater, Miriam Silverman, and Dylan Baker in The Disappear. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

The Disappear is billed as a “seriocomedy,” but it’s hard-pressed to find either serious emotional exploration or new laughs. The familiar love triangle writer/director Erica Schmidt has created–a self-important auteur who can’t keep his dick in his pants, his long-suffering though (we are often reminded) quite successful writer wife, and the ingenue who is the auteur’s “muse” and whom he wants to become his lover–is funny, occasionally, though it misses plenty of opportunities to embrace the farcical possibilities inherent in the solipsism and selfishness of most of its characters. And on the “serio” side, there’s an undercurrent of attention to issues–the increasing economic precarity of the creative class; the way gender stereotypes reassert themselves; climate change; the philosophical question of art vs life–but it grapples with them desultorily throughout and then makes an abrupt left turn into more overt activism near the end.  

But while its noncommittal  “have its cake and eat it too” approach to tone feels slapdash, it’s not what makes The Disappear so maddening. What makes it so maddening is that, while Schmidt’s script and her direction of Hamish Linklater as the auteur in question—film director Benjamin Braxton—make it quite clear that Ben is an unredeemable narcissist, the kind of guy who gets away with his outrageous statements by virtue of charm as much as talent, the reactions of the rest of the characters also leave us no doubt that he’s an unquestionable genius in art and in love. His best friend and producer, Michael Bloom (Dylan Baker, droll and British), tells him to stop “finding talent with the end of your cock,” but nonetheless waxes rhapsodic about Ben’s gifts when drunk (which he is on the regular). His wife, Mira (Miriam Silverman), a very successful novelist, might be ready to stab him with a carving knife on the regular, but the minute he turns the teeniest bit of sexual attention back to her, they’re having a quickie on the couch. His leading man, Raf Night (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), has little respect for Ben initially, signing on for a film he’s directing only because he wants Mira to adapt one of her novels—but once he sees the dailies, he too is making a speech about Ben’s “extraordinary work.” The ingenue, Julie (Madeline Brewer), is willing to both be putty in his directorial hands and give up her burgeoning career to raise his baby. Mira and Ben’s daughter, Dolly (Anna Mirodin) is the only one who seems mostly unimpressed by her father, but then again being mostly unimpressed by one’s parents is teenager 101. 

Linklater is, indeed, enormously charming, finding humor in Ben’s occasional recognition of his own self-absorption and taking every opportunity to throw his tall frame and gangly limbs into physical comedy. Nonetheless, it’s hard to see “genius” in this petulant, self-important man with absolutely no adulting skills. To the extent we learn anything about his work, it sounds either banal or derivative. I kept waiting for someone in the play to call out that the movie The Disappear, which he’s pitching until it gets somehow folded in to the adaptation of Mira’s novel, is a rehash of Gone Girl. He steals credit from his screenwriters. He got sued at least once for defamation. Ben thinks–or Schmidt wants us to think; the line is fuzzier than it should be–that he’s an Ibsen hero whose gifts are too exalted for this fallen world, but his ideas don’t really seem up to the task. 

And yet not only are we asked to go along with this genius myth, Schmidt subtly reinforces it by having Mira turn into as much of a self-centered asshole when she’s writing the screenplay, ignoring Dolly completely. Creative work always trumps ordinary life–although it remains clear that Mira’s work, whether as a novelist who’s also required to run their household or as a screenwriter who’s required to remain subservient to the director, is less important. And if Linklater takes every opportunity to make Ben farcically broad, Silverman takes the opposite (if equally watchable) tack, taming almost every opportunity the script gives Mira for histrionics into something more recognizably, wearily human. Mira is tired of Ben sucking up all the air in the room, over and over again, but she’s not going to dignify his behavior by matching it–she’s just going her own way.  

If Schmidt weren’t directing her own work, I might think a director had dulled the edges of what was meant to be a more vicious satire, or taken itself too seriously instead of going for a Noel Coward-esque sting within a cloud of fizz. Instead, we get a muddle that can’t get a grip on tone or genre even in the production elements, which are lavish but lean for the most part heavily into portent and the “serio” side of the seriocomedy. Brett J. Banakis’s set gives us hunting lodge and a completely superfluous rain effect; Palmer Hefferan’s sound design fills the transitions with dramatic music. Cha See’s lighting design culminates in a spark-y power outage (and also lights upstage French doors in such a way as to create extremely distracting reflective glare in the audience). 

It’s all far too navel-gazing: a play about an auteur who wants to make a movie about a play but instead ends up making one adapted from a novel; a comedy full of self-absorbed people taking themselves far too seriously that winds up taking itself far too seriously.