About the Project
Known Unknowns is a one-act play for two actors set in a single bedroom over the course of one night. A philosopher working in AI ethics and a university civil rights lawyer — three years together, politically literate, emotionally avoidant — discover in fifty minutes how much they have been hiding from each other and from themselves.
The title comes from former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld’s taxonomy of knowledge — there are things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know — and the play treats intimacy as an epistemological problem. How much of another person can you claim to know? How much do you need to? And what happens when the gap between your public self and your private life is not an accident but a survival strategy? The play shares a tradition with work that uses a single room and two people to expose what language cannot carry: the escalating revelation of Albee, the dramatic weight of withheld information in Pinter, the collision between intellectual fluency and emotional illiteracy that drives the best of Annie Baker. But its specific concerns are contemporary and largely unexplored on stage — algorithmic activism, the ethics of non-voting as principled position, the relationship between political identity and private desire, and whether love requires full disclosure or is in fact destroyed by it.
The play’s central image is a 1987 field recording of the last wild Spix’s Macaw — a single male calling for a mate that no longer exists. He calls and calls and does not know the silence is permanent. The play asks whether we are any different. Known Unknowns requires a playing space that is genuinely spare in which the silences are as replete with meaning as what people say to one another.
Minimal technical requirements. Maximum language. Written and directed by Jawad Ali.
Production Team
