Donald Margulies’s 1990s OBIE-Award-winning play, Sight Unseen, receives a solid and engrossing revival by Wasatch Theatrical Adventures, a company devoted to bringing the work of great American playwrights to L.A. (Previous productions include Moon Over Buffalo and All My Sons).
The play centers on the relationship between Jonathan (Jason Weiss), a hugely successful Jewish-American painter, and Patricia (Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris), the gentile girl he once loved and ditched. They meet for the first time in almost twenty years in a “cold farmhouse in England,” where Patricia now lives with her odd, cantankerous husband Nick (Mark Belnick), an impoverished archaeologist who despises the kind of glitzy modern art Jonathan sells for millions of dollars.
Jonathan, who is cocky and aggressive on the outside but wounded and lost beneath, has sought Patricia out for a complexity of reasons: guilt and curiosity, plus a desperate need to recapture the passion and idealism of his youth. Patricia, who married Nick mostly to gain British citizenship, finds herself drawn to the charismatic Jonathan again, but only in a superficial way. Other deeper, darker, more resentful emotions erupt in her.
The fireworks that Margulies sets off in the triangular love scenes are matched in the two scenes, set in London, between Jonathan and Grete (Casey McKinnon), an aggressive young German journalist who has come to interview him about his exhibition, only to end up needling him about the compromises he has made to achieve success (painting what the market wants, hiring publicists to plug his work, etc.) She also harps on his Jewishness, in such a way as to reveal her latent anti-Semitism–-and to make him want to throttle her.
Sight Unseen’s many fiery confrontational scenes, its drama, intelligence and humor (there are lots of laughs), combine to make the play work well, even as it jumps back in forth in time, finishing up in a New York arts college in 1973 (where Jonathan and Patricia first met). Having a strong, capable cast is another plus; ditto the contributions of director Nicole Dominguez and set-designer Adam Haas Hunter. Wasatch Theatrical Ventures has done Margulies proud, and the L.A. theater world is the better for it.
