ShowMag.com

Sight Unseen

Choularton, McAndrew, Crane
Photo by Craig Schwartz

By January Riddle

There’s a lot of yearning in Sight Unseen, Donald Margulies’ Obie-award winning, Pulitzer Prize-nominated work currently playing on The Old Globe’s temporary arena stage.

Celebrated artist Jonathan Waxman, whose paintings sell for astronomical amounts of money before he makes a brushstroke, yearns for closure to the life and the relationship he left behind. Patricia, the girl he left behind 17 years before, yearns for the excitement of that passionate love she once felt. Nick, Patricia’s husband, yearns for Patricia’s love. Grete, the German art critic and radio interviewer, yearns for her own celebrity.

Unfortunately, during much of the action taking place on the theatre-in-the-round stage, the audience yearns for an ending, or at least some kind of resolution. The latter is not to be, thanks to the playwright’s belief that audiences don’t want to be told whether something is right or wrong. Considering his usual themes, Margulies may be right. Margulies’ plays tend to focus on human relationships and knotty questions about art, artistic and societal responsibilities. This play’s issues are not different.

On the human relationships side, there’s the “Did he/she make a mistake in ending the relationship?” question. And the “What does forgiveness entail and who gets to forgive whom?” question. Both of those are examined way too long and with way too much excruciating discomfort by Jonathan (Anthony Crane) and Patricia (Kelly McAndrew), both of whom make you want to throw dishes against the wall.

But there is one interesting question, and it belongs to Nick (Ron Choularton). What does it mean, and is it demeaning, to continue to love and live with someone who does not love you back? There is really no answer to this, or any of the other questions posed in the play. Margulies has said he doesn’t give the audience resolutions, preferring that patrons argue the questions for themselves. So, we have to go with what we see and hear, feel and then think.

If it had not been for Jonathan’s visit, we think, Nick and Patricia could have gone on being comfortable with each other, settled like two old sweaters entangled in a laundry basket. Nick is an archeologist, and Patricia helps him dig up Roman latrines. Together, they squoosh through mud to find precious shards of a time long gone, celebrating their discoveries with comfortable cups of tea and an occasional toddy.

The mud and precious shards symbolism becomes even more obvious when Nick has a bit too much of the bourbon and babbles on to Jonathan about the evidence of Patricia’s yearnings. She has a penchant for digging up stories of their youthful days of yore and squirreling away her collection of mementoes that include the one postcard Jonathan ever sent her. Oh, and there’s the painting over the mantle that Jonathan gave her the day she modeled for his life art class. (Where is the question of why Nick would accede to that bit of home decorating?)

Nick gets his say and his reward for long-suffering, in the second act, however. Meanwhile, that painting’s creation, presence, and absence becomes the focal point of the play’s four flashback scenes and several arguments about art’s significance in the lives of the artist and the viewer.

Except for a humorous sequence about another of Jonathan’s paintings set in a cemetery, these Purpose of Art disputes come off like panel discussions in an art appreciation class.

Much of the fault for that tedium belongs to Esther Emery’s loose direction, which allows the passion of conviction to float away in stream-of-consciousness pontification. Anthony Crane’s Jonathan goes on and on about the viewer’s affect on art and the artist while Katie Fable’s Grete, lounging on a piece of furniture like a cabaret singer, gazes at him adoringly. This stagnant blocking makes the entire scene seem trite.

And then there are the issues of actor abdication in the process of making this play what the Obie Award committee envisioned. With the exception of Ron Choularton, who makes us at least wince at Nick’s lack of dignity and the unfairness of his husband-as-rebound situation, this Broadway and UK National Tour-experienced cast is puzzlingly awkward in this production. It becomes difficult to care about any of these characters.

Kelly McAndrew’s Patricia shouts all the time, and her shrillness loses sympathy. Anthony Crane’s Jonathan alternates between woodenly waiting for responses during conversations and pointing with every assertion like a trigger-happy gangster. Katie Fabel’s Grete can’t seem to settle on one believable accent instead of switching madly between a Russian kind of German and British.

Equally perplexing is the painting wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. If Jonathan is sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, how and why would he parcel up his stolen art piece? Why not rely on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief to cover up the blank canvas that we soon see, anyway? Better yet, why not produce a real portrait? There are plenty of talented local artists who could mock up a decent image of Patricia as ingénue.

There are plenty of plays featuring more interesting and dynamic relationship issues, too. This production leaves us yearning for a good revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
**** Sight Unseen” by Donald Margulies continues in the Old Globe’s arena stage at the San Diego Museum of Art’s James S. Copley Auditorium through September 7. Tickets at www.TheOldGlobe.org or 619-23-GLOBE.