Katie Kleiger and Dina Soltan in Mona Mansour’s “Unseen.” Photo by Chris Banks.
In Mona Mansour’s new play “Unseen,” the focus (with all due respect to the title) seems to be on that which is left unsaid—that which people keep hidden from one another so as to smooth over the wrinkles of their relationship. The problem is, what isn’t said can often cause the most damaging of explosions when you least expect them.
Under Johanna Gruenhut’s direction, what makes for a compelling story on paper becomes an emotional tour de force.
The play centers on two women, Mia and Derya. Mia is an adventure-loving, conflict photographer who was taught not to “look” too closely at her subjects lest she become too invested and thus risk living with the ramifications of all that she cannot unsee. Derya is her one-time partner and temporary caregiver. An academic, Derya seemingly approaches most things in life with the type of philosophic laissez-faire that many might ascribe to academics—except when it comes to Mia. Derya’s intense need to nurse her former partner back to health—from what exactly, we aren’t sure initially—consumes her.
The play features strategic time jumps, painting Derya and Mia’s relationship in kaleidoscopic overtones. (If anything, I would have liked to have seen more about the genesis of their relationship.) Ultimately, it comes down to a disoriented and confused Mia on Derya’s couch with no real memory of how she got there. Little by little, pieces start to come back. And once her camera is recovered from the location of her last assignment, the puzzle gets completed. The horrors and the nightmares come flooding back.
The couple spends 90+ minutes dancing around one another—around their past, around their fears, and around their feelings. It’s evident that both women are either too scared or too jaded, or perhaps both, to let their guards down and vulnerably confess: “I need you.” Alas, the camel’s-back-breaking straw plaguing many an otherwise promising relationship. The arrival of Mia’s mother goes a long way toward showing Mia’s multi-dimensionality. More than the devil-may-care photog, Mia is also a frightened little girl at heart, not certain if she’s able to contend with the monumental sorrow inherent to her job. The character of Jane, Mia’s mother, also adds a much-needed bit of levity in the form of her delightful naiveté in regard to her surroundings and Derya’s culture.
Mosaic Theater’s production does a wonderful job of sustaining the turbulent poignancy of the relationship between the two central women, and also that between Mia and Jane–not to mention the relationship between Mia and her job. Katie Kleiger as Mia performs a veritable balancing act between a self-involved, somewhat flighty photographer and a traumatized witness of all that she has seen but cannot really speak about. Her fluidity on stage is easy to watch as she dynamically whisks the audience through the vicissitudes of her own emotional rollercoaster. You root for her to find a way through—whatever “through” might look like for Mia.
Dina Soltan as Derya embodies the words of wisdom that often we all need to hear in exactly the way we should hear them. I have no idea how she pulls it off but there is at once something comfortably familiar about her portrayal and also, she evokes a hard-edged nobility that makes her seem almost untouchable. It’s quite an impressive acting feat. Then there is Emily Townley as Jane. The character of Jane is, in some ways, who we all are in this play. Her impassioned speech about how many of Mia’s subjects would jump at the chance to live her “boring and comfortable” life was among the most memorable of the production. Townley delivers with grace and vulnerability in a play that is very much about both of these things.
Under Johanna Gruenhut’s direction, what makes for a compelling story on paper becomes an emotional tour de force. It seems as though Gruenhut understood from the very beginning the bigger questions at stake here and did not back down for a second. Kudos. Set design by Emily Lotz was quite clever, interspersing a larger-than-life, symbolically explosive tree, with everyday elements from a modest Turkish home. The scenery matches the thematic complexity of Mansour’s work. Mona Kasra’s projections in tandem with Jesse Belsky’s lighting and Matthew M. Nielson’s sound design do a very nice job of capturing the urgency of the moment while also nodding to the theatricality of it all. Leaving the show, one can’t help but try and organize all of the various pieces of this play into some sort of linear narrative. Yet, much like life itself, there is an elusive quality about the production that flies in the face of too prescriptive a linearity. And that is a very good thing.
Running Time: 90 minutes.
“Unseen” runs through April 23, 2023 at Mosaic Theater Company at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. For more information and to purchase tickets, click here. Masks are still required in performance spaces and theaters.
