Is faith a belief in something greater than yourself — God, for instance — or a kind of wishful thinking, a desperate hope that you will live in the hereafter and one day see those you loved and lost?
That’s the question at the heart of “Sea Wall,” a one-man play written by Simon Stephens for Andrew Scott, who performs it with breathtaking intensity at Off-Broadway’s Studio Seaview through Oct. 30.
Originally presented in London in 2008 and subsequently at Manhattan’s Public Theater in 2019, “Sea Wall” is about many things. Ostensibly, it’s about a man who has everything — a well-paying career as a commercial photographer, a wife he loves, a daughter they adore, a friend whom they vacation with at his home in the South of France — until he doesn’t.
It’s also about the audience’s relationship with the performer, made more intimate here by the small scale of Studio Seaview — there isn’t a bad seat in the house; the lack of a proscenium; and the knowledge that its 19 performances are being filmed before a live audience for a film about the making of theater. (Tina Satter is the director.)
And then there is the star — a once-in-a-generation talent —who inspired the play and this project and is already being talked about as an Oscar contender for his role as Ian Charleson playing Hamlet in “Elsinore,” which will be released Nov. 20. A compact man, well-muscled without being ripped, who turns 50 during the run (Wednesday, Oct. 21), Scott has a soaring voice and an expressive face and body. His sculpted arms provide a humorous moment early in the play and a devastating one toward its end. He also has the kind of charisma that you can’t quite put your finger on, which is probably what makes him so charismatic, and a gift for pacing and pauses that he used to utterly unnerving effect in the Almeida Theatre’s 2017 production of “Hamlet.”
Here he performs the monologue, as he did Hamlet, as if he’s thinking of the words as he’s saying them, doubling back, interrupting himself, letting thoughts die and pausing to collect others as well as his emotions. There’s a moment in which he walks downstage and looks out the window at a clearly visible 43rd Street in Manhattan, wiping tears from his eyes. Is the character overcome with emotion or is the actor? We don’t know, and since we’re the unspoken second character — the collective person he’s telling the story to in a play that’s being filmed — we “act” our part, laughing at the funny bits until we arrive at the moment when we hold our collective breath, not moving a muscle.
(Although I had all I could do to control myself when Scott’s Alex recalls how happy he was signing a contract to photograph the products for TJ Maxx, a store that is one of my Sunday afternoon haunts and to which I repaired after seeing the 45-minute show. Ah, the serendipity that can bring the august, the theater, together with the pedestrian, an off-price store.)
Scott’s eloquent pauses and silences dovetail beautifully with a play that tells its story — or rather shows its story — in part by what it doesn’t say. Tony Award-winning playwright Stephens is like an artist using negative space, creating presence through absence.
What emerges is a portrait of a man undergoing a sea change of the soul wrought by tragedy. In the beginning, Alex very much doubts there is a God, adding he doesn’t know. Yet at the end he can say, “Just because we don’t know doesn’t mean we won’t know.”
Alex is certain we’ll find the answer. Then the stage goes dark, the lights come up, the star bows and we finish our part as his admiring audience, on our feet.