David Cale’s last two plays feel like companion pieces, about artists whose interrelated thirst for companionship and literary inspiration bleeds the porous psychic boundaries between their personal lives and their art. 

The Bushwick Starr’s Blue Cowboy and Studio Seaview’s The Unknown concern lonely writers who are so laser-focus committed to finding a muse for the page — and a lover off the page — that this desperation generates figments of their imagination who simultaneously populate their art AND their corporeal reality.

At least in Blue Cowboy, the question of whether the object of his desire is actually one such figment remains a mere suggestion. But The Unknown basically revolves and unwinds around explicating this suggestion, ultimately pondering if the author’s bachelordom is not only a product of his career zeal, but necessary fuel for his creative process.

Obviously the song and the sentiment “If You Had Wanted Me” — which is contextualized as a lyric from the scribe’s oeuvre — plays a central role in The Unknown. Because it’s credited as being about unrequited-love-interest Larry, the implication seems to be: if Larry had wanted the narrator (Sean Hayes), then perhaps he wouldn’t have been inspired to put pen to paper on the ditty?

When Larry isn’t home at the end of the play, maybe he’s merely out…or busy…or even finished with their friendship, fed up with the writer’s sacrificial fidelity to his craft…

Or, Larry never existed at all, yet another fictitious figment for the artist’s illusory companionship, and for the sake of his dramatic illusions.