The problem with writing a play about absence: How to fill the void? When a performance artist known as Miriam (Cynthia Nixon) vanishes in “The Seven Year Disappear,” a two-hander by Jordan Seavey that opened Monday at the Signature Center, we know only that she is a narcissist who steals the air from any room she enters. “The Whitney is mine,” she exclaims in the opening scene, after her adult son and manager, Naphtali (Taylor Trensch), informs her that the museum has made some sort of offer to Marina Abramovic. After seven years off the map, when Miriam returns, she has the gall to ask Naphtali whether he will help turn his abandonment into her next piece. Scenes following Miriam’s reappearance, which occurs on the heels of the 2016 election, are intercut with a reverse chronology of Naphtali’s search for her, which is really a quest to find himself — in a change of careers, a series of sexual liaisons and a lot of hard drugs.

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Persons: Miriam, Cynthia Nixon, Jordan Seavey, “, Whitney, Taylor Trensch, Marina Abramovic, — Organizations: Signature