Sight Unseen probes the role of the artist
Playwright uses biographical elements to weave an intricate plotline and complex characters
There is plenty of playwright Donald Margulies' biography that crops up in his 1992 high-culture drama, Sight Unseen. Margulies, for instance, spent a year and a half of his early college days studying visual arts. Likewise, his play's protagonist - an acclaimed painter named Jonathan Waxman - is shown at crafting his first undergraduate canvases in the script's concluding flashback. Margulies also grew up in a Brooklyn family with a strong sense of Jewish cultural identity. Waxman is the product of a similar religious background and willingly confronts it in his works - most of them monumental painterly nudes, including one oft-mentioned (and never shown) rendering of an interracial couple in a Jewish cemetery.
Still, as Waxman insists at several points, it isn't the artist that matters - it's the art. That may not be a novel concept, but it is one of the wide-ranging and endlessly debatable principles that the Everyman Theatre's autumn production of Sight Unseen crisply presents.
By turns presumptuous and beautiful, director Daniel de Raey's incarnation of the Obie Award-winning tragedy of manners features some well-wrought performances. Margulies' writing, however, is seldom particularly subtle. Due to de Raey's source, the compelling battle of personalities that his cast wages is drowned out by a larger and far less satisfying war of ideas.
The bulk of Sight Unseen's action takes place at the rustic English home of Nick and Patricia (Bob Rogerson and Deborah Hazlett), a couple who is hosting Jonathan (Paul Morella) in advance of a much-anticipated overseas exhibition. Waxman, at this point, is an international phenomenon, capable of fetching incredible prices for open-ended commissions - of selling his work "sight unseen." This baffles Nick, a timid archaeologist. But Patricia, thinly veiling her dissatisfaction with life in Britain, is most deeply moved by her estrangement from Jonathan, who regarded her as his muse and lover years before.
Still, as Waxman insists at several points, it isn't the artist that matters - it's the art. That may not be a novel concept, but it is one of the wide-ranging and endlessly debatable principles that the Everyman Theatre's autumn production of Sight Unseen crisply presents.
By turns presumptuous and beautiful, director Daniel de Raey's incarnation of the Obie Award-winning tragedy of manners features some well-wrought performances. Margulies' writing, however, is seldom particularly subtle. Due to de Raey's source, the compelling battle of personalities that his cast wages is drowned out by a larger and far less satisfying war of ideas.
The bulk of Sight Unseen's action takes place at the rustic English home of Nick and Patricia (Bob Rogerson and Deborah Hazlett), a couple who is hosting Jonathan (Paul Morella) in advance of a much-anticipated overseas exhibition. Waxman, at this point, is an international phenomenon, capable of fetching incredible prices for open-ended commissions - of selling his work "sight unseen." This baffles Nick, a timid archaeologist. But Patricia, thinly veiling her dissatisfaction with life in Britain, is most deeply moved by her estrangement from Jonathan, who regarded her as his muse and lover years before.
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