Lauren Ambrose Anchors Nick Payne's 'The Unbelievers' at Manhattan Theater Club

Lauren Ambrose plays a mother lighting a candle for a vanished 15-year-old, and she is superb. That is the headline fact of Nick Payne's "The Unbelievers," now open at New York City Center Stage 1 in a Manhattan Theater Club production directed by Knud Adams.

The play's premise is brutally simple. Oscar, age 15, has disappeared. His family — mother Miriam, father David, older siblings Nancy and Margaret — is left to pick over the wreckage. Did someone harm him? Was there an accident? Did he run away, perhaps because of his parents' recent split? The critics' notebook framing calls the family's worst pain "the torment of not knowing what happened to him," and the play refuses to resolve it.

How does the play handle time?

"The Unbelievers" hopscotches across the aftermath: mere hours after the disappearance, then one year, then seven years. This is not a horror show, despite the market's current appetite for the genre. It's a quiet vigil of a drama — a wry British import that, as the review puts it, "worms its way into the audience's viscera" and proves "more realistically frightening" than any ghost-story rival on the boards.

Ambrose's Miriam is the production's engine. The review describes her performance as "a woman at sea, frantically swimming — exhausted, disoriented, barely afloat but undeterred." Too tenacious for skepticism, Miriam chases down every supposed Oscar sighting that crackpots send her way. She tells her other children, Nancy (Nina Ross) and Margaret (Elizabeth Yeoman): "I want to make sure that your brother knows that we never, ever, not even once, gave up."

That line, not any religious creed, is Miriam's faith. It's a pointed irony: Miriam and David (Tom Riley) are both atheists, yet supernatural trappings creep into the family's search for solace as the years grind on.

What does the staging add?

Paul Steinberg's set does the metaphorical heavy lifting. A stained-glass window stands on one side of the auditorium; several rows of wooden church pews sit onstage as audience seating. Churchy, yes. Religious, no. The design signals communion and vigil rather than doctrine — a congregation of witnesses watching a family hold its own funeral that never quite happens.

The cast, assembled by the actor-adept Adams, is accomplished overall. Marjan Neshat does double duty, radiating warmth as a police liaison officer and as David's partner, Lorraine. One caveat, delivered here without ceremony: her British accent is distractingly shaky. Better to drop it altogether.

The unnamed counterweight in the review's frame is "2:22: A Ghost Story," the horror-adjacent hit where Jasmine Cephas Jones plays a mother hearing spooky sounds and earns her own "superb." Two mothers, two vigils, two genres — one realist, one spectral. Payne's play stakes its claim on the scarier proposition: that absence without answers can outlast any ghost.