Off-Off-Broadway Play Reimagines Damien Hirst with a Gay Lover Named Shape

An off-off-Broadway production titled The Wreck of the Unbelievable presents a fictional scenario in which Damien Hirst has died and is survived by a gay partner called Shape, portrayed by the playwright Sleth. The play runs over 80 minutes and could be tightened by about 15 minutes. Shape is first seen sprawled face-down on a messy mattress that evokes Tracey Emin's 1998 work My Bed. The narrative hinges on Mara, a former party acquaintance of Hirst who now works as an assistant curator at the Guggenheim Museum; she visits to gather salacious details about the supposed secret affair for a hastily arranged Hirst retrospective at her institution. Shape dismisses her employer, joking that it is not the Whitney Museum or MoMA. The script repeatedly stresses that the real Hirst is alive and straight, yet uses the invented premise to explore obsession and the price of an artist's hunger for fame and fortune. The production's set design and direction are described as tight, with poetic touches: a wisp of smoke hovers over the performers as a Surrealist sign of memory, and UV light later exposes a disturbing tableau reminiscent of Sandy Skoglund's photographs. The staging also references the Young British Artists, asking what the YBA star was really like, and answers with a crude pun. The play is uneven but strangely infectious.