Jordan Gleaves, Jacob Coggshall, and Carlos Andrés Mai Photo by

The Unseen is a 2007 play by Craig Wright which presents the torturous conditions of liminality. Though written in the shadow of the United States' Global War on Terror and its brutal treatment of prisoners at facilities like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Wright's play enacts liminality as its core mimetic engine. Are we witnessing events set in the past, reliving America's sins committed against foreign actors on distant soil? Or are we thrust into the unseen horrors of ICE detention facilities that sit near our own backyards?

Wright provides nothing concrete, no tether to hold us to a time, place, or situation from which we can draw inferences about the world–what little of it there is to know–surrounding the characters. And Steve Needham's excellent direction engages the play's liminality by folding time on itself. The guard, Smash (Jacob Coggshall), dons a punisher-style mask–a favorite visage of federal agents currently terrorizing Chicago and its suburbs. Meanwhile, the two prisoners, Wallace (Jordan Gleaves) and Valdez (Carlos Andrés Mai), wear threadbare clothes (design by Kasey Wolfgang) indicative of the ten years that they claim have passed during their detainment. We are in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Broadview, Illinois all at once. The audio-scape of the prison (design by Zach Stinnett) surreptitiously undermines the passage of time by retreating into and out of the liminal space, including an especially hostile alarm punctuating silences with increasing unpredictability. A simple and effective scenic design (by Malia Hunter) works in tandem with the lighting (design by Jack Goodman) to signal a sense of familiarity with what feel like the tropes common to media portrayals of a prison space while simultaneously encapsulating the characters (and us) in a space that charges such tropes with a gruesome reality.

The action and dialogue follow Wallace and Valdez as they wrestle with holding on to any sense of reality. Brilliantly cast in this Tin Drum Company production, Gleaves and Mai play off one another with a conversational intimacy of having spent years together sharing a cell wall. And despite the severity of their situation, Wallace and Valdez' interactions are peppered with a gallows humor that mercifully infuses moments of levity into the play's otherwise grave subject matter. There is an inexplicit familiarity to the two men, as if they are an amalgamation of famous comedy duos–Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Pinky and the Brain–into the prison of liminality and stripped of their playful humor.

Wallace is the intellectual, interpreting the patterns of prison life, educating Valdez with the care and concern of every patient teacher, and retreating to the recess of his mind. Gleaves gives a command performance, expertly drawing us in with his ability to build through sheer imagination a world outside of the one we all occupy over the course of the play. Mai's performance centers Valdez as a source of genuine connection–a portrait of empathic concern despite circumstances of malignant depravity. They are an infinitely watchable duo, the tenebrous totality of what is left of the human condition amidst the most inhumane conditions. And it should be noted that Coggshall's performance as the appropriately named Smash realizes the full extent of the terror that makes for existence in this liminal space. To be unseen is not a circumstance of the space itself but our willingness to look and see what diminishes the humanity of each character, to dissolve their liminality with our concern and empathy.

The Unseen is Tin Drum Theatre's second show of 2025 and solidifies the company's willingness to mount challenging works which embrace the beauty found on the edge of human depravity. And with a run-time of only 80 minutes, the difficult and weighty content ensures audiences won't drown in lengthy despair.

Tin Drum Theatre Company's The Unseen runs through November 23, 2025, at Bramble Arts Loft, 5545 N Clark St., Chicago IL. Performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30pm and Sundays at 2:30pm. For tickets and information, please visit www.tindrumtheatre.com.