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Cynthia Nixon On Playing Eight (Out of 10) Roles In ‘The Seven Year Disappear’
“Motherhood is the only thing in my life that I’ve really known for sure is something I wanted to do,” Cynthia Nixon once said. She stands by that still: “I always knew I would become a mother,” she tells Observer. “I’m not a person with a lot of goals, but that was certainly at the top of my list.”
In real life, she has three sons of her own, and, as an actress, she won one of her two Tony Awards playing a grieving mother who is subconsciously trying to erase the memory of her deceased four-year-old son, in David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Rabbit Hole.
Quite a different Mama Nixon is on view at the Signature Theater these days (through March 31) in Jordan Seavey’s The Seven Year Disappear, and she isn’t whistling “M Is for the Many Things She Gave Me.”
Mostly, what Miriam (Nixon) has given her son (Taylor Trensch) is her absence—and the name of Naphtali (Hebrew for “struggling” or “wrestling,” which describes his relationship with his mother), yet he sees her everywhere: in the faces of friends, coworkers, a guy he’s flirting with in a dark bar.
Miriam is a world-famous performance artist. “When I’m trying to explain who my character is to people, I always say that she’s like the American Marina Abramovic,” says Nixon. (Nixon and Abramovic have crossed paths before. Abramovic’s 2002 piece The House with the Ocean View—in which the Serbian conceptual artist lived inside a gallery on three open platforms in a gallery 12 days, sustained by only water—was the basis for a season six episode of Sex and the City, though Nixon’s Miranda character does not go the gallery.)
Once Miriam’s art is installed in sacred places like MoMA, she vanishes for seven years, leaving her son to fend for himself and Wolfgang, a Teutonic friend of the family and his lover.
“I love the way the story plays with time,” Nixon notes. “It goes largely backwards in time, but you have a parallel track of what’s happening right now with........
© Observer
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