The Unbelievers – 30 October 2026
A stylistic, serious take on a tragic situation, The Unbelievers is the story of a family in the wake of the disappearance of a fifteen year old boy named Oscar. Oscar’s family contains an unusually rich wealth of perspectives: his mother’s former husband Karl (Hadi Tabbal) is a vicar, his eldest sibling Nancy (Nina Ross) is nonbinary, his sister Margaret (Elizabeth Yeoman) is the closest there is to normalcy, his father David (Tom Riley) is a mathematician, and his mother Miriam (Lauren Ambrose) has serious mental health struggles that cloud her ability to understand her loved ones and take care of herself. After Oscar’s disappearance, everybody seeks a different kind of closure, ranging from statistical to supernatural, stopping along the way at spiritual and ceremonial. The action of the show spans several different points in time in a kaleidoscopic, nonlinear fashion, moving between the days just after Oscar’s disappearance to the one year anniversary, to the seven year anniversary (at which point Oscar can legally be presumed dead).
Though each character is grieving in their own way, Miriam is centered in many of the scenes. She is unraveling the most, and refuses all forms of consolation. She is constantly trying to take care of people in ways that they don’t want to be taken care of— from the mundane level of not wanting a drink or a snack to scolding Margaret when she shares the news of her pregnancy, which would mean the birth of Miriam’s first grandchild. Miriam engages in various forms of self harm, and, in once scene harms another who is trying to be kind to her. It all comes together in a monologue towards the end of the play, in which Miriam says a series of lines that she has said in previous scenes but in a different order, as though putting together the pieces of her own story in her own breakdown. At this moment it becomes clear that the audience has been inside Miriam’s narration, and that the abrupt shifts from one scene to another, jumping in time in a willy nilly fashion are in fact part of Miriam’s inability to stay grounded in the present time as she analyzes every moment of her past, seeking what she did wrong. Unfortunately for her, even if she could identify a place where she went wrong, it wouldn’t bring Oscar back. Lauren Ambrose gives a tour d’force performance that swept me away in its all-encompassing embrace of absolute terror.
In terms of how this was presented on stage, the set (Paul Steinberg) was a living room contained within a church, perhaps indicating Miriam’s attendance at the memorial that David and Oscar’s other loved ones spend a good chunk of the show trying to convince Miriam to attend. Half of the audience is seated onstage, leaving a rather puzzling focal point for typical theatre patrons where the extreme house right of the typical NY City Center Stage 1 was actually the center of the room, with the onstage audience getting a rather interesting perspective and the house left side of the theater space seeing a lot of backs of heads. Knud Adams’ blocking has a triangular shape in most scenes where it feels like the amount of energy is finite and each person’s moves cause a counter movement somewhere else. The lighting (Masha Tsimring) was jarring and disconnected, like Miriam’s thoughts, but also unflattering in many moments (again, like Miriam’s thoughts). Costumes (Enver Chakartash) for the principle roles didn’t change until Miriam’s mind did, a brilliant visual symbol of Miriam being able to see changes in her loved ones for the first time since her head and heart froze when Oscar didn’t come home.
When Miriam’s loved ones staged an intervention to ask her to come to the memorial with her family despite a potential identification of a boy who likely wasn’t Oscar in Ghent, her peace of mind and beginning of acceptance is signaled by the resolution of a repeated offer that Miriam makes in practically every scene: that of drinks or snacks. At the end, Miriam’s family is able to accept water and wine from Miriam, indicating that they trust her with herself enough to begin trusting her with others. It’s a moving gesture, and resolves Miriam’s journey even though she had vowed to never stop taking every chance to search for her lost son. This small, seemingly inconsequential scene of eating and talking is breathtaking in context, and a wave of calm washes over both the actors and the audience as Miriam’s world begins to right itself.
The Unbelievers is a journey that engulfs the audience in a kind of anguish as each unresolved piece is presented and then removed before a true conclusion can be reached. It gives a very real sense of what it’s like to be in distress and what it means to truly love someone by giving many definitions instead of one. Loving can be praying for someone. It can be letting go. It can be trying to summon them. It can be wanting different choices for them. It can be music. It can be laughter. It can be drinks and snacks.
I attended this performance on a press pass from The Press Room.
