Rehearsal Room Report
Behind the Scenes of Nick Payne's 'Delightful' and 'Tragic' New Play 'The Unbelievers'
David Buchanan
“My favorite place in the world is a rehearsal room,” beams Lauren Ambrose on the brilliantly sunny morning of Thursday, September 17, in Manhattan Theatre Club’s midtown studios. The Tony Award-nominated actress, who returns to the New York stage for the first time in eight years in the off-Broadway production of The Unbelievers, gathered with the play’s ensemble, playwright Nick Payne, and director Knud Adams to meet the press one week into rehearsals. Previews begin next Tuesday, October 13.
The Unbelievers stars Ambrose as Miriam, a mother of three whose teenage son disappears; the play chronicles her journey of confusion, determination, grief, and myriad other emotions across three different moments in time: the week of, the year following, and the seventh year after his disappearance. Structurally, the play evokes Payne’s other works—including Broadway’s Constellations that starred Jake Gyllenhaal and earned a Tony Award nomination for Ruth Wilson—which also cut across temporalities.
Playwright Payne describes his initial inspiration for The Unbelievers as his “desire to write about faith and belief—both religious and non-religious—in a way that was sensitive and thoughtful and open-minded and trying to ask big questions rather than answer them.” One such question he hoped to grapple with during the writing process: “How do you cope when something happens in your life which is so vast if you don’t have a system of belief to help you?”
Director Adams believes the premise of the play necessitates its complex structure. “There’s something about what the characters are experiencing that can only be reflected in a kind of abstracted form. There’s something so vast and unknowable about it that a conventional approach would under-deliver conveying it to an audience.” Ensemble member Hadi Tabbal feels similarly, noting, “The objective is to get an emotional experience of the temporal rollercoaster” that Miriam and the audience are on together, but he promises that the play itself will not be too confusing to follow, quipping, “It’s not like a Christopher Nolan puzzle.”
Ambrose, most recently seen on Broadway as Eliza Doolittle in Bart Sher’s My Fair Lady, relates personally to both the show’s themes and its tricks with time. “I’m kind of obsessed with the passage of time in general as a human and have my own difficulties dealing with it,” confesses the actress, who adds, “The idea of loss, incomprehensible loss, or when something incomprehensible happens, that’s what we’re exploring. We’re all here peering at the idea of how to navigate the world when something [that] there’s no answer for presents” itself.
Ambrose’s co-star Tom Riley, who plays Miriam’s husband David, isn’t a stranger to navigating the shifting terrain of time on stage. The actor made his Broadway debut in and earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which toggles between the early nineteenth century and the present day, which are connected via an English country estate. He sees clear “parallels” between that iconic work and The Unbelievers, suggesting of playwright Payne, “The way he uses time in order to communicate something to somehow bypass the brain to really hit you in the feels is very similar” to the late Stoppard. He recollects of collaborating with that great playwright, “It was the most extraordinary, formative experience of my career.”
For others in the cast, the family drama also resonates with our current societal moment. Jack DiFalco, a young Broadway veteran of Marvin’s Room, The Ferryman, and Torch Song, stresses the show’s timeliness, articulating, “You hear The Unbelievers and you think it has a lot to do with religion—and it does—but it’s also a lot of other institutions like science, family, things that we look to for answers all the time, and this play asks the question of what happens when they aren’t giving you the answers you’re looking for.”
Though the play’s theme of loss and its multiple timelines could sound either heady or dour, the ensemble emphasizes that Payne’s writing is multifaceted and unexpectedly witty. Nina Ross, who recently worked with Adams on MCC Theater’s Cold War Choir Practice, observes, “His humor comes out in the most delightful ways. It’s not a comedy and it’s very real and tragic circumstances and he honors that very beautifully and truthfully, but with that comes bizarre, crazy stuff that humans do when they’re dealing with crazy circumstances.” Elizabeth Yeoman, who plays Miriam daughter Margaret, concurs, describing the play as “delightful and joyous and funny and tragic” because “Nick’s writing is really nuanced.”
Transatlantic theatergoers may be familiar with The Unbelievers from its production abroad last year at the Royal Court Theatre in London, directed by six-time Tony winner Marianne Elliott and starring Nicola Walker in Ambrose’s role. Despite the recency of that production, Payne and Adams are approaching this American debut as a wholly new piece. “I was definitely interested in revisiting it and re-excavating it and mining it all over again, in a way. It’s closer to a new play or a new iteration of the same play being performed for the first time,” reflects Payne. Adams echoes the sentiment, sharing, “Nick has been doing a tremendous amount of writing. It feels very much akin to what I do all the time, which is launch into fresh snow.”
But it will not be altogether new for Adams, as the Tony-nominated director has reassembled many of his collaborators from the 2025 Broadway production of English for The Unbelievers, including stars Tabbal and Marjan Neshat, costume designer Enver Chakartash, sound designer Sinan Refik Zafar, and more.
“I love them very much. We’ve been on a journey together the last few years,” reflects Adams about this reunion, adding, “It’s a really happy mixture of old friends, new friends, and just a big ensemble that we’ve compiled very rigorously and lovingly who are up to the task.”
For Tabbal and Neshat, the appeal lies in Adam’s process. Tabbal explains, “Knud is a very sophisticated director who creates beautiful things,” and he admits that he signed onto to The Unbelievers because he realized he would be “in a beautiful room visually and also in a room that is hyper-focused on no bullshit, and that is so sexy to me as an artist.” Neshat, who earned a Tony Award nomination for her performance in English, added, “I really think when you get to work with the same people over and over, you develop a language of trust. There’s always this higher vision that you can hold onto and know you’re in good hands.”
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