The American painter in playwright Donald Margulies' "Sight Unseen" is at a turning point. Rich, famous, yet spiritually hollow, he's about to open his first London show, a big one titled "Jonathan Waxman: A Retrospective."
We meet Jonathan when he reconnects with his long-ago lover and muse, Patricia. He's come to her English farmhouse to ask forgiveness for his cruel rejection of her 15 years ago, but he's also there, we soon learn, because he's seeking the better self she saw in him and he has since lost.
For the Old Globe, director Esther Emery has guided a beautifully balanced cast through the subtly layered, time-scrambled scenes of Margulies' thoughtful breakthrough comedy. Audiences may want to check their programs beforehand to date the eight scenes, some set in the present, several seen in flashback. But thanks to this strong cast, patrons will have no trouble at all following the emotional zigzags, the jabs and feints within each scene.
Anthony Crane creates an appealingly ambiguous figure in the big juicy role of Jonathan. Kelly McAndrew suggests the once-radiant sexual power, the vulnerability and the largely self-inflicted unhappiness of Patricia.
And these fine leads are counterpointed by two actors who've mastered the psychological complexity Margulies wrote into even their much smaller parts.
Ron Choularton creates a figure at once comic, sinister, and pitiable as Nick, the shabby archeologist Patricia married on the rebound. And Katie Fabel struts and preens as the believably fierce German art critic Grete, whose relentless (and well-prepared) interview questions expose Jonathan to self-laceration -- and ultimately to her at-first-disguised anti-Semitism.
"Sight Unseen," first produced in 1991 at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa, is densely riddled with some of the same questions about artistic ethics and integrity, about Jewish identity and the price of assimilation that echo through Margulies' later, differently shaded plays "Collected Stories" and "Brooklyn Boy."
Those scripts, like "Sight Unseen," have also been produced at various San Diego theaters including the Globe, the San Diego Rep, and North Coast Rep.
In Emery's excellent revival of "Sight Unseen," some themes propelling the pointed Grete-Jonathan discussions of art have lost their satiric currency. We hear less these days about celebrity artists commissioned to do obscenely expensive paintings "sight unseen"; that was a symptom of the greedy, cocaine-fueled 1980s, when trendy artists had the well-advertised incomes of pop stars. Or perhaps, we're now accustomed to such corruption in the art world.
Still, the masterful way Margulies has constructed those interview scenes allows Fabel's Grete to maneuver Stone's Jonathan into a corner from which he cries out against the very corruption that supports him, his (unseen and pregnant) dancer wife, and their large upstate New York home.
Patricia's adoring frump of a husband, Nick, is more direct about his disgust with contemporary art and the inflated egos of artists who earn millions on commission. Early on, Choularton's Nick also taps undercurrents of envy, malevolence and potentially violent prejudice that recall the actor's creepily effective turns in Pinter's "The Caretaker," "Ashes to Ashes," and "The Lover" at San Diego's Sixth@Penn (now Compass) Theatre.
But the core of the Globe production comes in the meetings of Jonathan and Patricia, the self-styled "sacrificial shiksa" whose unguarded openness as his model during their student days opened his talent and helped it bloom.
As Patricia, actor McAndrew brings a robust, corn-fed health to the flashback scenes that make all the more poignant the bottled-up energy and anger her wounded Patricia struggles nervously to restrain in the present day.
One of the most rewarding aspects of the writing for these characters is that neither is all right or all wrong or anywhere near perfect. Time has not helped either become a full human being. Both are sympathetic. Margulies thus leaves open the possibilities they might have realized had they been able to maintain their connection.
So there's an electricity in the spare English cottage where Patricia takes her stand against the man who couldn't separate from his demanding mother soon enough to break from his heritage and cast his fate with hers. But there's a recklessness about her too, even now.
And though Jonathan finds a missing part of his artistic self when he sees (and takes back) the first painting he did of Patricia, Stone gives us a Jonathan who's no more emotionally or morally resolved at the end than when he arrived.
Emery staged "Sight Unseen" in the Globe's temporary arena stage in the Copley Auditorium of the San Diego Museum of Art. From an audience perspective, the new space is comfortable and intimate, with good sight lines and acoustics. And though Nick Fouch's simple and elegant set serves the play and Emery moves the actors fluently enough, the technical limitations of the new theater caused an occasional hiccup in the pacing. "Sight Unseen" has been better visualized with a turntable that allows smoother transitions between now and then.
Still, while the Globe builds its new Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre at its main Balboa Park site, there's something very right about watching Margulies' insightful play about an artist and his muse in this art museum. In divergent ways, the art museum's current shows ("Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle" and "Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes") explore similar themes.
"Sight Unseen"
When: 7 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through Aug. 24
Where: The Old Globe at the James S. Copley Auditorium, San Diego Museum of Art, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $42-$64
Phone: (619) 234-5623
Web: theoldglobe.org
