When a graduate student at the Boston Architectural College, a bright young man with a promising future, went missing in 2012, Boston playwright Cassie M. Seinuk’s mind went to an unusual place: what if our collective consciousness could become an actual setting where people in trouble could meet and help each other find their way back?
What if two such people were, say, reimagined by a playwright as a closeted gay man facing a darkly abusive situation and a prisoner of war captured in the Middle East?
In Seinuk’s new play, From the Deep, premiering through March 28 at the Boston Center for the Arts, Seinuk fictionalizes aspects of two frightening true stories—the 2012 disappearance of the BAC student and the 2006–2011 abduction of an Israeli soldier. She places her two characters together in her parallel universe where people of disparate backgrounds and beliefs can reach out to one another and learn to face, and even hope to overcome, the worst of ordeals.
As Seinuk neatly summarizes the plot:
“After five years as an Israeli prisoner of war, Ilan believes his freedom is nearly in sight. In another part of the world, Andrew’s life hangs in the balance as he awaits his captors’ final move. Their two fates intertwine when they meet in a new dimension that has no regard for space and time. As their lives tick away, they must figure out a way to keep each other alive before they both go missing forever.”
Seldom has this reviewer seen a play set in a parallel universe, created entirely from the playwright’s imagination, transcend the genre of science fiction or the theater of the absurd. But like the best of Harold Pinter, that Nobel Prize-winning playwright, Seinuk and her cast and crew of this production have created a riveting theatrical experience. The audience not only clutches their seats to find out the final outcome of the two trapped men but also hangs onto their every sentence of dialog to learn how they come together to cope and hopefully overcome their similar yet totally different dilemmas.
“From the Deep” is the second production from the Boston Public Works playwrights, whose mission is to “forego the traditional routes for play development and produce one play by each of us, putting the power of production in the hands of the playwright.”
