The Cell, the Spell and the Mystery of 'Sea Wall/A Life'

NEW YORK — I didn’t go back to the Broadway double bill “Sea Wall/A Life” to rereview it. I went back, twice, to try to figure out what was real.

That’s not the usual task with theater, a species of choreographed make-believe. But when a moment in Simon Stephens’ “Sea Wall” morphed into a tiny, persistent mystery, it sent me cartwheeling through questions of art and truth, trust and deception. Weeks later, it still makes me squirm a bit.

Not the show itself, mind you — tragicomic monologues of fathers and children, love and grief, starring Tom Sturridge in “Sea Wall” and Jake Gyllenhaal in Nick Payne’s “A Life.” Sturridge, in particular, is so comfortably natural that he might convince you of anything.

It was his performance that staggered me the first time I went to the Hudson Theater this month to see Carrie Cracknell’s production. A seemingly spontaneous moment was so striking that I opened my review with it.

An electronic voice, apparently emanating from a device somewhere in the orchestra section, intruded into the wordless last moments of “Sea Wall.” This is the sort of mood-shatterer that routinely outrages audiences, but Sturridge refused to let that happen. “It’s OK,” he soothed, and somehow the way he said it made it so. Down went our ire; on went the show.

The next morning, though, after I filed my take on the production, suspicion crept in. My editor told me that a colleague who’d seen a different performance had witnessed a moment similar (but maybe not identical; hard to say) to the one I’d described. Alarmed, I emailed the show’s publicist, who responded that it had been real — an Amber Alert and an improvised response. Uneasy, I asked again; he assured me more emphatically. So we went with it.

Then, about 24 hours later, came a tweet from an unfamiliar Twitter account. Whoever sent it, the tone was benign: “Hi Laura, the cell phone going off is part of the show ... when he says it’s okay. It happened in the two times I saw the show.”

Uh-oh. Had the moment I’d found so masterful been contrived? It wasn’t in the copy of the script the press had been given, and I didn’t remember it from the production’s run earlier this year, downtown at the Public Theater.

Back I went to the publicist. Maybe it was just my eroding sense of certainty, but his replies to my freaked-out queries seemed both narrower (there are “no phone sounds in the show like this”) and squishier.

Because this was early August. Only one night before, a backfiring motorcycle had caused a panic in Times Square, with pedestrians seeking shelter in theaters from what they thought was gunfire. A few weeks earlier, shows were disrupted by a flash flood warning coming over multiple audience members’ phones. So was this was just the Hudson staff taking extra care to insulate the performance from the anxiety outside?

“Sea Wall/A Life” is somewhat unconventional anyway. Sturridge is onstage, in character, well before the play begins. Even earlier, Gyllenhaal spends a while up there. With actors already in the room, a recorded turn-your-phones-off reminder would disrupt the atmosphere.

Could it be that the show, consequently, was more likely to be riddled with interruptions by noise-making devices, and that “It’s OK” was Sturridge’s smart go-to response? If so, that wouldn’t make his gentle skill at keeping the audience with him, phones notwithstanding, any less extraordinary.

But if it was fabricated, this precarious moment so close to the finish of such a delicate monologue, it would be sheer recklessness — like building a fragile castle from the finest beach sand, then threatening to kick it over just as the tide approaches, about to lap it away.

If the Amber Alert was fake, too, that would be worst of all, amping our sense of real-world danger in service of a play that in no way needs that kind of aid.

The more I thought about it, the more tangled I got. I trusted nothing — which, granted, might just be a sign that I’m a journalist. But underneath the skepticism, something else nagged at me: the sense that my incertitude was a metastasis of our jittery, gaslit world, where baseline reality is increasingly in dispute.

To settle my own mind, I went into reporter mode. Returning to the Hudson the next evening, I watched “Sea Wall” in a state of heightened tension. Would there be cellphone interruptions? Amber Alerts? Would Sturridge say, “It’s OK”?

No, no and no. Fluke?

The following Monday night, I went again: same thing. Maybe because, phonewise, the ushers had grown even more vigilant? Still, it felt inconclusive.

So, knowing from red-carpet photos that Tom Hiddleston had been at opening night, and since I was interviewing him about “Betrayal,” the Broadway show he’s starring in, I asked him about the performance he saw.

He hadn’t heard an electronic device go off. “But I remember ‘It’s OK,’” he said, unsure what had prompted the phrase.

“Is it in the text?” he asked.

No, I said. But might I have been given an outdated version of the play?

It occurred to me that I had Stephens’ email address, from a story I wrote a few years ago about a protégé of his. I sent a message, explaining my puzzlement.

Eighty minutes later, Stephens’ unequivocal response arrived.

“It’s absolutely not a scripted moment,” he wrote. “I think both Tom and Jake have been directed by Carrie Cracknell to perform as though they are in the actual room that they are, well, performing, in.” (Look at those commas. Playwrights! Even their emails tell you where to pause.) Moments like the one I described are “a consequence of bold direction and brave acting,” he said.

Two minutes after that, a second message from Stephens: “The more I consider this the more central it seems to the whole show. We wanted to make a piece that acknowledged a shared humanity with the audience.

“Shared humanity,” he added, “seems a politically urgent thing to acknowledge nowadays.”

It moved me, this argument; I felt myself actually exhale. Because I agree with him, not only about the urgency but also about what Sturridge and Gyllenhaal achieve, there in the room with us.

I’d like to think that Stephens neatly resolved the mystery. But really? I can’t quite reconcile the recurrence of “It’s OK.”

I was tempted, of course, to put the question to Sturridge. But having asked the publicist four times already, I knew the show’s official answer. I also worried slightly about getting inside an actor’s head.

And in the grand scheme, I realize, it doesn’t matter: beautiful performance, crystalline play.

It’s just that I prefer to know where, beneath the make-believe, the solid ground lies. Lose your footing there, and you’re in for a perilous fall.

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