The contemporary art world has long fascinated theatergoers, serving as a backdrop for high drama, staggering fortunes, and outsized egos. Yet few productions dive into the absurdities of celebrity culture quite as brazenly as The Wreck of the Unbelievable, a strangely infectious, if occasionally uneven, new off-off-Broadway play that uses an utterly fantastical premise to interrogate the heavy costs of chasing fame and fortune.
Written and smartly performed by the artist known as Sleth, the roughly 80-minute production centers on an imagined, highly unconventional relationship. In the world of the play, renowned British contemporary artist Damien Hirst—who is very much alive and, to the best of public knowledge, straight—is dead. He is survived, however, by a grieving gay lover named Shape, portrayed with sharp theatrical poise by Sleth.
As theatergoers file into the venue, they are greeted by a striking and deliberate visual homage to contemporary art history. Shape is discovered sprawled out, ass up, on a disheveled mattress that immediately recalls Tracey Emin’s iconic 1998 conceptual installation, My Bed. This initial tableau sets the tone for a production that gleefully blurs the lines between high art, personal obsession, and tabloid-style gossip, while using the fictionalized affair as a weird wormhole to examine what drives artists to crave the ultimate rewards of the global art market.
The narrative kicks into gear when Shape is visited by an old party friend named Mara, played with nervous ambition in her new professional skin. Mara and Shape share a history of bohemian—or perhaps hipster—yesteryears, but Mara has since moved on from their wild days to secure a respectable position as an assistant curator at the Guggenheim Museum.
Shape, true to his bohemian roots, is hardly impressed by her career milestone, casually joking that a post at the Guggenheim isn’t exactly the kind of institutional validation one might find at the Whitney Museum or the Museum of Modern Art. But Mara’s visit is not merely social. She is under immense pressure, working on a rushed Damien Hirst retrospective for the museum, and she needs to extract some seedy, insider details about the artist’s legendary private life. Eager for salacious anecdotes to flesh out the museum’s catalog and exhibition framing, she presses Shape for answers: What was the Young British Artist star really like behind closed doors? According to this theatrical reimagining, the answer involves intimate revelations about the artist’s physique, underscoring the play’s satirical preoccupation with the mythology surrounding celebrity creators.
Despite its brisk runtime, the production occasionally shows structural strain. The 80-minute performance could easily trim about 15 minutes to tighten the storyline and maintain narrative momentum. However, what the play sometimes lacks in narrative economy, it makes up for in stylistic precision and atmospheric staging.
The set design and direction are notably tight, punctuated by moments of genuine poetic resonance. In one evocative sequence, Shape and Mara reminisce about their youth, and a delicate puff of smoke lingers above the performers like a Surrealist flourish, physically manifesting the hazy nature of memory. In another striking visual shift later in the production, ultraviolet light floods the stage, transforming the space into an eerie, glowing tableau that feels directly inspired by Sandy Skoglund’s haunting, hyper-stylized photographs.
Through these theatrical flourishes, The Wreck of the Unbelievable manages to transcend simple satire. It offers a theatrical mirror to an art world obsessed with legacy, market value, and the relentless machinery of retrospectives, filtering heavy themes through a lens of absurd intimacy and sharp wit.
