"The short version: Hannah was married to Andrew, and Anna was married to Ryan. Then Anna and Andrew slept together and both marriages blew up. Then, six years after that, just as Andrew was finishing the manuscript of a novel closely paralleling his breakup, he found out that Hannah had beat him to the punch: Her book about a marriage-destroying affair (subtitled "A Memoir [kind of]") would be published nine months before his."
"The air is similarly thick with egotism in the Minetta Lane Theater right now, as Erica Schmidt's malignant-marriage story, The Disappear, makes its debut there. Set in an ancestral Hudson valley farmhouse belonging to a successful Hollywood director and his novelist wife-dark wood, old carpets, old books, abstract fields of wheat right up to the front door-the play reaches for something Ibsen-esque: Here, big ideas will be explored as human cruelties and frailties tear domesticity apart. But it's a promise that Schmidt's writing can't keep."
Four writers became entangled when Anna and Andrew had an affair that destroyed two marriages. Years later both produced books about the affair; Hannah's memoir-style book was scheduled for publication nine months before Andrew's novelized account. The resulting public humiliation and self-absorption are presented as symptoms of broader narcissism among the parties involved. A stage play, The Disappear, is set in an ancestral Hudson Valley farmhouse owned by a successful director and his novelist wife and aspires to Ibsen-like examinations of cruelty and domestic collapse. The play, however, relies on in-crowd jokes, thin dialogue, and solipsistic characters, flattening its thematic ambitions.
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