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“Sight Unseen” Plumbs Psychology of
Ambitious Painter and the Woman he Discarded
Past intrudes through surprising,
shifting flashbacksthat alter the present
By Lucy Komisar
Two people have a relationship and each regards it, and
the aftermath, totally differently. Hardly a new phenomenon. But in Donald
Margulies’s hands, this story becomes a fascinating “Rashomon”-type look
into the past. It’s also a study in two kinds of almost neurotic fixations,
one about love, the other about career.
The portrait that Jonathan Waxman (Ben Shenkman)
painted of his lover Patricia (Laura Linney) when they were in college in
the U.S. 15 years ago hangs in the chilly Norfolk, England, stone farmhouse
she now shares with her British husband, Nick (Byron Jennings). The painting
is almost a totem, representing a lost love to her and an invisible rival to
Nick.
Director Daniel Sullivan emphasizes the play’s edge and
mystery, so that even the most common-place events seem to have other
meanings. It is an absorbing production. Only an interview with the artist
by a German journalist (Ana Reeder) drags.
 When Jonathan dropped Patricia, she decamped to
England, and met and married the archeologist Nick, a big man who is almost
painfully shy. She had studied archeology and now runs their excavation.
Their farmhouse kitchen, designed by Douglas Schmidt, has an old porcelain
stove, wood table with mismatched spindle-legged wood chairs, and shelves
with plates that are leftovers from broken sets. They struggle on meager
stipends.
Jonathan arrives after many years because, now famous
and rich, he’s opening a one-man show in London. And he remembers the
painting.
As the former lovers spar, you start taking sides. He
dropped her because she was a “shiksa.” Point against him. He makes sexually
and racially exploitative pictures, including one of a black man atop a
white woman in a cemetery – is it rape? Another point lost.
 Nick calls Jonathan’s art pornography. Corporations are
buying this porn art “sight unseen.” Jonathan remarks on “the lengths people
go to in order to feel something.” His face is bereft of personality; he
seems to have no conscience. How about him feeling something? Patricia, on
the other hand, is suffused with the pain of lost love. Laura Linney gives a
rich, complex portrayal of a woman whose soul seems gripped in a failed
passion. Jennings is a worthy foil as a man quietly suffering from
unrequited love.
The scenes flip back and forth in time, so that just as
you think you’ve made up your mind about who is “guilty” in the failed
relationship, you learn some new, earlier facts. Who seduced who, anyway? Is
a college romance a commitment for life?
 Then, there is the Jewish aspect. Jonathan is Jewish.
His cemetery painting is called “Walpurgisnacht,” Witches’ Night, and it’s
of a Jewish cemetery spray-painted with swastikas. His mother didn’t like
Patricia because she was a “shiksa,” but then he married another one.
Patricia refers to herself as “the sacrificial shiksa who laid the
groundwork.”
Margulies presents a clever aperçu about Jewish artists
who are successful but still choose to think of themselves as outsiders – as
artists and as Jews -- as alienated from mainstream culture. Shenkman is
good as the New York neurotic, though he somehow lacks the passion of a man
who lets ambition rule his life.
The ideas get a little messy and are never altogether
resolved, but sometimes a play’s success is in such messiness, in not tying
up all the ends, so that – as in this case -- you walk out talking about the
work, trying to figure both it and the characters out.
“Sight Unseen.” Written by Donald Margulies. First
performed in 1992. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Starring Laura Linney, Byron
Jennings, Ben Shenkman and Ana Reeder.
Manhattan Theater Club, at the Biltmore Theater, 261
West 47th Street. Tue-Sat 8, Wed, Sat, Sun 2. $26-$81. 212-239-6200.
Images by Joan Marcus
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