Review: ‘The Unbelievers’ is a blank portrait of grief

Nearly 75,000 children are reported missing in the United Kingdom each year. In Tony Award-nominated playwright Nick Payne’s new play “The Unbelievers,” a young boy named Oscar Wright is one of these lost children, leaving an empty wallet and grainy CCTV footage as the only clues to his whereabouts. As the play begins, the audience looks into a dining room lit with a nauseating shade of yellow as the play begins. What unfolds is an investigation steeped in unrelenting disaster. It’s the kind of tragedy in which the only possible answers lie in ambiguity. Maybe he was killed or trafficked, or perhaps he left just because he was angry with his parents. Ultimately, the play uses Oscar’s disappearance to ply the power of the audience’s empathy. But without doing any of the rough storytelling work to characterize the empathy, the dry mystery often has an exhausting effect.

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