'The Unseen' a prison drama punch to the brain and - oddly enough - the funny bone

Steve Key (left) and Danny McCarthy in The Unseen. Bottom photo: Steve Key (from left) Danny McCarthy and Keith Kupferer.

The Unseen is a short, sharp shock of a show, testosterone-fueled by a powerhouse trio working at peak capacity. Directed by Dado to pile-driving intensity, it’s the kind of punch to the brain - and the funny bone - that underlines the gladiatorial energy and fearless, emotional violence that defines the best of Chicago’s mighty store front theater scene. This is the sort of show – not those high-gloss, multi-million dollar endeavors that draw tourists to the Loop – that comprises the bloody, pulsating heart of the Chicago theatrosphere.

In actors Steve Key, Danny McCarthy and Keith Kupferer, we have riches that transcend spectacle. You don’t need to enter in a floating bubble or levitate on a broomstick when the acting is this full-blooded.

Playwright Craig Wright’s tale centers on men living on the knife edge of madness – or perhaps they’ve toppled over it, unmoored by circumstances horrible beyond the powers of most imaginations.“I’m so close to the end of myself I can see it, like a stripe in the distance,” says Wallace (McCarthy), speaking through a rough-hewn stone wall to Mr. Valdez (Key), his unseen companion of 11 years.

The two are prisoners of an unnamed totalitarian regime. In solitary confinement cells smaller than most bathrooms (exquisitely grim and claustrophobia-inducing work by set designer Matt Reese) they stubbornly, indomitably grasp for the last, flimsiest straws of sanity and the equally unlikely notion that one day they might go free. Echoing Kafka and Beckett, Wright threads his drama with jarring humor while illustrating in graphically disturbing terms the barbarity humankind so easily and so often disintegrates into.

Wallace talks with the precise, modulated rationale of a professor. “You know, Mr. Valdez,” he ponders at one point with all the exactitude of a mathematics instructor, “I always half wondered if you were just a voice in side my head.”

To a degree, Wright keeps the audience wondering as well. As Wallace begins explain how he has absolute proof that “this is the day the hot air balloons are leaving from the red velvet ballroom through the vast vertical air shaft lined with colored lights,” it seems entirely possible that each man is nothing but the other’s hallucination – or maybe even a manifestation of some sort of belief system, a God wrought from years of unmitigated, senseless torture.

Key and McCarthy are almost unrecognizable, layers of grime, blood and sweat (or rather, an extremely realistic make-up version thereof) caking their skin and providing a horrific visual of 11 years in a forgotten prison. When they start comparing notes on torture and “trips to the sink,” you can all but feel the pain down to your fingernails. Completing the grim reality of the prison is the array of harsh, random buzzers and alarms, noises that assault the ears and leave the skin twitching thanks to sound designer Joe Court.

The third human factor in the piece is Smash (Kupferer), a hulking torturer whose twisted (almost beyond recognition) conscience leads him to ponder grotesque new machines (de-tonguers, eyeball gouger-outers) that might help him sleep better at night.

In a blood-spattered plastic black apron ominously equipped with a tool belt, Kupferer creates both pathos and comic relief in wildly unlikely places. It’s a testimony to his grasp of menace and merriment that a torturer is able to elicit empathy as well as revulsion.

It’s Smash who propels The Unseen into a final third that stops just short of being confoundedly preposterous. This could happen, you find yourself thinking even as events become ever more ludicrous. Maybe it already has happened, somewhere. And like the absurd word game Mr. Valdez and Wallace engage in throughout the piece, Wright’s wild ending is a thing of unconventional beauty, startling humor and the transcendent hopefulness that can persist even at the bottom of a forgotten abyss.

The Unseen continues through March 1 at A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells. Tickets are $20 and $25. For more information, call 312/943-8722, go to www.aredorchidtheatre.org or click here.