The Titillating Tale of Damien Hirst’s Gay Hole
An infectious play by Sleth explores infatuation and fame through an imagined relationship between Hirst and his gay lover, a younger artist whose paintings consist of holes on the ground.
The Wreck of the Unbelievable is a strangely infectious, if uneven, little play about obsession that takes on the fantastical premise in which renowned artist Damien Hirst is dead and is survived by a gay lover named Shape (smartly played by playwright Sleth), who greets theatergoers sprawled, ass up, on a disheveled mattress reminiscent of Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” (1998). The production makes it clear that Hirst is very much alive and straight, to the best of our knowledge, but the idea makes for a weird wormhole into the nature of infatuation and the costs of being an artist who craves the good stuff — fame and fortune.
The off-off-Broadway play runs over 80 minutes, though it could easily clip 15 to tighten the storyline. The seemingly hungover artist is greeted by an old party friend named Mara who has since become an assistant curator at the Guggenheim Museum. Shape’s hardly impressed and jokes that it’s not exactly the Whitney Museum or MoMA. The plot focuses on his friend’s need to extract some seedy details of this secret affair for a rushed Hirst retrospective she's organizing at the museum. What was the YBA star really like, she asks? Hung, apparently — at least in this theatrical reimagining.
The set design and direction are tight, with some poetic moments, like when Shape and Mara revisit their bohemian — or were they hipster? — yesteryears. A puff of smoke lingers above the performers like a Surrealist flourish to denote memory. In another flash, UV light floods the stage to reveal an eerie scene reminiscent of Sandy Skoglund’s haunting photographs.
