Center
Stage with Pat Launer on KSDS JAZZ88
THEATRE REVIEW:
“Sight Unseen”
The Old Globe (in
the Copley Auditorium of the SD
AIRDATE:
AUGUST 22, 2008
Jonathan Waxman is lost. He may seem like he’s sailing through life, an internationally
acclaimed artist whose high-priced paintings are bought sight unseen, before
they’re even created. He may be making his big European debut with a
retrospective in
He’s come to a rural English farmhouse to visit Patricia, the college
lover and muse he dumped summarily 15 years ago. He’s looking for something, and we’re never
quite sure what. He leaves with a piece of his past, once again devastating the
hapless Patricia. Her husband, Nick, also filled with anger and pain, unleashes
all his resentment and jealousy on Jonathan, skewering the man – and modern
art. The triangle gets smaller, tighter, more intense, moving backward and
forward in time. We ultimately see how Jonathan and Patricia were when they
first began, he a shy, tentative artist, she a proud dilettante. Hopscotching across the decades, we watch them and their
relationship evolve and devolve. And between those scenes are snippets of an
interview with German art critic Grete, who nails Jonathan on his hypocrisies,
and riles him with her Jew-baiting questions.
The play is breath-taking, with its sharp, smart dialogue, its many
layers of anguish and subtext, its unresolved issues and ultimate
uncertainties. No heroes or easy answers here. The motivations and interactions
are as messy as real life. And that’s a stunning accomplishment.
In this Obie Award-winning 1992 drama, Donald
Margulies is contemplating identity and art, fame and insecurity, fathers and
sons, anti-Semitism and Jewish paranoia. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
paints small, elusive figures on an expansive canvas, filled with color and
complexity, ideas and imagery, with flagrant dollops of ambiguity. His
multi-hued characters are desperately flawed, hurtful and self-destructive.
Like the play, Jonathan’s paintings, he confesses, are about “the lengths
people go to in order to feel something.”
The Old Globe Theatre production, nimbly directed by local talent Esther
Emery, is a finely etched and moving piece of work. It plumbs the play’s depth
and nuance, but less of its humor and sexuality. The performances are solid and
the interactions intense. As Jonathan, Anthony Crane wafts in and out of being
believably Jewish, but he’s strong in his emotional range. Kelly McAndrew skillfully transforms Patricia from disenchanted
drudge to seductive ingénue. Local favorite Ron
Choularton, reprising a role he first tackled in 1993, is spot-on as Nick, shaggy
and taciturn, with a lifetime of bitterness roiling under the surface.
If you don’t emerge from this provocative, perceptive play with tons to
talk about, you haven’t been paying attention.
The Old Globe production of "Sight Unseen” plays in the Copley
Auditorium at the
©2008 PAT LAUNER