The People Who Never Walk Onstage: Five Invisible Characters Who Steal the Show

Blog 79 - Another moment when the theatre reminds me why it has always been my life.

Many of my blogs come from my book, Theatre Is My Life, but this is a new one inspired by a recent production I saw of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances…”

Tom, describing his father (Mr. Wingfield) in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie

As a director, teacher, designer, and theatre lover, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the people who walk onstage, making their various entrances and exits: the stars, the villains, the clowns, the lovers, the doomed. But lately I’ve been thinking about another category altogether, the characters who never appear at all and yet somehow run the whole show.

An invisible six-foot rabbit can overturn an entire household. A child no one ever sees can set the fairy world at odds and send lovers wandering through the woods. A man who never arrives can become the center of a play about waiting. A dead king can drag a son toward ruin. A smiling father in a photograph can haunt a family as surely as any ghost.

The theatre understands that absence is not empty. Sometimes the people who never walk onstage are the very ones who shape the story most powerfully. I’ve worked on five plays that know this well: Harvey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Waiting for Godot, Oedipus Rex, and The Glass Menagerie.

With Harvey, the missing character is almost a theatrical joke played on realism itself. A six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch rabbit, never seen, yet treated by Elwood P. Dowd as if he were the most natural dinner companion in the world. Harvey’s invisibility is part of the fun, of course, because every production depends on the audience imagining him into existence. And what he reveals is not so much himself as everyone else.

The play becomes a test of the visible world: who is sane, who is rigid, who is lonely, who is kind, who is willing to accept the possibility that the world may contain things that cannot be charted by common sense. Some absent characters matter not because of who they are, but because of what they reveal in everyone else.

Shakespeare’s take—with the missing Little Changeling Boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—is less comic than catalytic. We never see the boy at all, and yet he is the cause of the quarrel between Oberon and Titania, and therefore of the fairy world’s imbalance. The weather is out of joint, the seasons are confused, the lovers are sent wandering, and all because of a child who never appears before the audience. That is one of the deliciously Shakespearean things about the play: the tiny unseen center of it. This absent little boy becomes a kind of dramatic butterfly wingbeat. He is not onstage, and yet the whole enchanted forest tilts around him.

What Harvey and the Changeling Boy share is that they introduce the subject almost playfully. They are whimsical, even magical absences. One is a rabbit no one sees, the other a child no one sees, and both somehow manage to throw the visible world into disarray. But absence in theatre does not stay whimsical for long.

Godot is not just an unseen character; he is practically a philosophical condition. Harvey and the Changeling Boy make us laugh or marvel, but Godot makes us wait. And in Waiting for Godot, waiting is the action. The absent figure is no longer simply a clever dramatic device. He becomes the embodiment of deferred hope, unanswered expectation, the possibility that meaning is always just over the next hill and never actually arrives. Vladimir and Estragon do not spend the play pursuing Godot or even really discussing him in any concrete way. They spend it enduring the space his absence creates.

When I worked on Godot, and later watched other productions, what struck me again and again was that the title character never has to appear because the play is not really about him at all. It is about what waiting does to the human spirit. About how people fill the empty air with jokes, quarrels, routines, memories, and scraps of hope while waiting for someone or something that may never come.

Because of course, theatre understands something terrible and true about human beings. Godot is the missing person who turns absence itself into the landscape of the play. Harvey disrupts ordinary life. The Changeling Boy unsettles the natural world. Godot unsettles time itself. His absence becomes the landscape through which the entire play must travel.

Laius in one of my favorite plays ever, Oedipus Rex, is absent because he is dead before the play begins. But his absence is not passive. It is a trapdoor under the whole drama. The play begins with a city in crisis, and the search for the murderer of Laius becomes the engine of the action. But Sophocles, being Sophocles, has made the missing man far more than a victim whose death must be solved.

Laius is the hidden past rising up to devour the present. His absence is the shape of the truth Oedipus cannot yet bear to know. The dead king never walks onstage, and yet every step Oedipus takes toward justice leads him closer to Laius, and therefore closer to himself. Unlike Godot, whose absence points toward the future, Laius pulls the past relentlessly into the present. Godot is longed for. Laius is dreaded.

And now, let’s go from exalted tragedy to heartfelt memory drama. In The Glass Menagerie, the father has been gone for years, and yet he is one of the strongest presences in the play. He is there in the family photograph smiling down from the wall. He is there in Amanda’s bitterness, in Tom’s restlessness, in Laura’s fragility, in the cramped apartment that cannot stop organizing itself around the wound he left behind.

Tennessee Williams gives us no entrance for him, no scene in which he speaks, no reconciliation, no return. He simply remains the absent center of the household, the original deserter, the man who “fell in love with long distances.” And that may be exactly why he is so haunting. There is no final encounter to reduce him to ordinary human scale. He stays large because he stays missing.

Laius and Mr. Wingfield are both absent fathers of a sort, but one belongs to myth and one to memory. One brings plague and revelation; the other brings abandonment and longing. Yet both prove the same theatrical truth: some of the people who most determine our lives are not the ones standing in front of us, but the ones who are gone.

By the time I reached this point in thinking about absent characters, I realized I had known one all my life. My maternal grandfather, who had fought in World War I died seven years before I was born. He left four daughters, ages 17, 15 (my mother), 8 and 3. He was in New York on a work assignment, and passed away from pneumonia in December 1943—caught in a cruel historical window where penicillin had already been proven a miracle cure, but had not yet made its way from the WWII battlefields to civilian hospital beds.

His presence was palpable in the house next door to where I grew up, which was home to my grandmother and great-grandmother and mom's three sisters who still lived at home at the time. A deeply loved, extraordinarily handsome, funny man, he was often talked about, remembered, and mourned by all of those females. Because the loss had been sudden and unexpected, the death shattered the family's sense of security, leaving survivors rebalancing roles in their grief-stricken and altered future. My grandmother never remarried. And as we all came along, my brother, twelve cousins, and I never knew what to call him, except our missing Grandfather Jack.

So perhaps absent characters onstage feel familiar to us precisely because we have all felt their presence in our own lives. Theatre knows what families know, what grief knows, what memory knows: some of the most powerful people in our lives are no longer in the room, and yet they still determine the scene.

A dead parent, an estranged child, a vanished spouse, a lost friend, a person for whom we still wait, a person whose leaving changed the weather of the whole household. They may not walk onto our stage anymore, but they continue to shape our dialogue, our silences, our choices, our fears, our hopes. They remain, in one way or another, part of our life’s own cast.

Perhaps that is why these invisible characters are often the hardest roles for an audience to forget. We never see them, yet somehow we leave the theatre carrying them home.