Sight Unseen

Critics Choice

A rich artist and his jilted lover paint fine characters at the Rep

With its mainly British setting, its fragmented chronology, its intense head-butting over social and sexual issues, all grounded in deeply guarded but raw personal emotions, Donald Margulies' "Sight Unseen" has aptly been compared to works by Harold Pinter - in particular to "Betrayal" with its doomed love affair run in reverse time.

Other English playwrights, such as Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill, bear comparison as well. But though British in tone and technique, the main characters in "Sight Unseen" are wholly American: the fabulously successful artist named Jonathan Waxman, played by the new North Coast Repertory Theater artistic director David Ellenstein, in an impressive acting debut at his theater; and Waxman's vivacious, long-forsaken shiksa girlfriend Patricia, played by DeAnna Driscoll, an emotionally scalding San Diego actress.

Reeling from the recent death of his father, but unable to take time to sit shiva, 40ish Waxman, who like his author is a Jewish New Yorker, is in England for a big retrospective of his work. His renown is such that rich patrons queue up to buy even his still uncompleted works "sight unseen."

Impulsively he looks up Patricia, whom he has not met since he heartlessly dumped her 15 years ago. Embittered, Patricia has made a marriage of convenience with an English archeologist, Nick (Tim West), who deeply resents Waxman, blaming him for the marital passionless-ness of his wife.
And that's not the half of it. As an added sideshow, we see Waxman face a subtly hostile interview with Grete (Jennifer Eve Kraus, deliciously ambiguous), a baby-faced blond German reporter whose pointed questions about his above-the-fray aesthetical posturings, and especially about his Jewish background, send Waxman stalking out in a snit.

Happily for the stage illusion, we never view any of Waxman's celebrated art, although it is described to us as big, bold, bleak allegorical canvases of "nude men and women alienated from each other and their environment." Patricia also possesses an early nude study of her, said to exhibit a "purity" that Waxman's current output lacks.

But art is only the pretext. The things of deepest concern in this interesting play are time and loss, the erosion of love and powers, and the search and longing for their remnants. Ideas, themes and images intermingle in complicated yet unified patterns. Ralph Elias (in his welcome theatrical return to San Diego) has directed with swift, passionate lucidity, illuminating the drama's diverse strands and making the time shifts easy to follow.

The portrayals of all the characters at North Coast Rep are vivid, yet shaded with subtle colors. In the flashback scenes, for instance, we see Waxman's young selves, excellently delineated by Ellenstein. We glimpse his emotional abyss at the time of his mother's death, when he broke with Patricia; and in the play's final scene, which takes place two years before that, we are shown the passionate (at least on Patricia's part) beginning of their affair. And here we must forgive the playwright's use of that corny counterintuitive cliché about the nubile young hottie having to throw herself at the reluctant, shy and high-minded male.

Jonathan Waxman, inscrutable to the last.

North Coast Rep's 'Sight Unseen' demonstrates 'dazzling clarity'

Director Ralph Elias stages a fine quartet of San Diego actors in Donald Margulies' 1991 play "Sight Unseen," which continues at North Coast Repertory Theatre through Sept. 7.

The production's hallmark is a dazzling clarity of character and motivation. Such clarity is not easily achieved and sustained in a play that weaves back and forth in time. It's a kind of "The Way We Were" that doesn't come together until the final scene, which is the most removed from the present time.

Not a very likable sort, Jonathan Waxman is a phenomenally successful American artist, so popular that there is a waiting list of patrons eager to purchase his next works "sight unseen." The Brooklyn bred artist has come to London for his first international exhibition, and before it opens he pays what seems a nostalgic visit with Patricia, his former lover and model, and her husband, Nick, a taciturn archaeologist.
The woman Jonathan remembers as "running wild, aggressive and demanding" is also an archaeologist, and he has a hard time believing she does not miss Zabar's. How can a woman once so vibrant be truly enthusiastic over the petrified cherry pits she finds in Nick's nearby Roman-era garbage dump?

Hanging over her mantel is a portrait Jonathan once painted of the nude young Patricia when they were both students. To love a shiksa was as exotic to him as he, a rather Bohemian Jewish artist, was to her. Evidently they fell in love and lived together, and their breakup, which Margulies reveals in an ensuing scene, broke Patricia's heart.

Jonathan, a self-proclaimed high-minded artist for art's sake ---- fame came by fluke ---- apparently intends to steal away with the early nude and exhibit it in London without Patricia's consent. As he is confronted by Nick, Patricia and a German journalist named Grete, it becomes clear that Jonathan is not, and perhaps never was, the moral artist he claims to be.

In the larger sense, the playwright asks ---- as Yasmina Reza more abstractly did in her later play, "Art" ---- what is the purpose of art and the place of the artist in society and, furthermore, what constitutes art.
Originally commissioned and premiered by Orange County's South Coast Repertory, "Sight Unseen" is a provocative, well-made play. North Coast Repertory Theatre's new artistic director, David Ellenstein, shows his considerable acting chops as Jonathan. Driscoll captures both the resigned, mature Patricia and the passionate, youthful Patty. Tim West's Nick reveals his overtly crude character's simple goodness. In her NCRT debut, Jennifer Eve Kraus still has a way to go with Grete.

Marty Burnett creates an effective, revolving stage setting, quite realistic in its country kitchen. Jeff Jones' sound design underscores the proceedings with jazz and then, most affectingly, with a flash of Bach, played by unaccompanied cello. Leslie Anne Malitz is the costume designer and Jason H. Thompson, the lighting designer.

The production is an uptick for North Coast Repertory Theatre, following a rather dismal "Charley's Aunt," the first production in Ellenstein's regime. The return of Ralph Elias to San Diego is also a harbinger of good things. Let us hope to see more of both men.

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