The Unseen

DUNGEON MASTERS Key, left, and McCarthy try to control their domain.

Photo: Matthew Gawryk

Squirreled away in the confines of a claustrophobic prison, inmates Wallace and Valdez devote their days to strategizing escape routes, mulling the architecture of their holding pen and fantasizing over future seaside jaunts. Don’t wait around for any electrifying getaway scenes: The Unseen is more living-room-drama-style inquiry into epistemology than fast-paced episode of Prison Break. Wright dedicates much of his dramedy to uncovering whose method for finding meaning—Wallace’s empirical formulating on the one hand, Valdez’s hard-core magical thinking on the other—better measures the realities of their purgatorial penitentiary.

The work thrives more in spite of these philosophical musings than because of them, soaring highest when Wright ditches ponderous monologues and mines Wallace and Valdez’s caustic master-sidekick dynamic for all its comic worth. Wright’s got a sordid eye for painfully disdainful male-on-male friendships, à la The Big Lebowski. Taken together, Wallace’s jittery onslaught of academicese and Valdez’s woefully dim-witted responses paint a fascinating picture of the trust and vindictiveness inherent in relationships of necessity.

In lesser hands, the snarky bullying that pervades The Unseen could wear thin. But under Dado’s rigorous hand, McCarthy shades Wallace’s witticisms with a desperation that indicates the itching urge for freedom that incites his endless browbeating. Yet more remarkable is Key’s dim-witted Valdez. Designed primarily as an obtuse foil to Wallace’s cutting wit, Valdez could easily be played in the one-note key of dumb. Key opts instead to tote a faint, tight-lipped smirk that belies his simple words. Amid bleak Gitmo allusions and weighty theoretical concerns, the details of one mismatched relationship glue us to our seats.