There’s a wonderful little play on at the Manhattan Theater Club, written by Donald Margulies, who also wrote “Found a Peanut” and “The Loman Family Picnic.” It’s called “Sight Unseen,” and that’s pretty much how you should take it. The play (it’s running at the company’s Stage II space, so you have to get there early, because the policy is “general seating”) concerns Jonathan Waxman (Dennis Boutsikaris), an Eric Fischl–type painter who decides, while in London for an important opening, to drive out to the farmhouse where an old girlfriend whom he once treated badly now lives with her archeologist husband (John De Vries). The girlfriend (Deborah Hedwall), who shares her husband’s profession though not his bed, is now fifteen years older and more bitter, and that’s probably all you should know about “Sight Unseen,” except that it’s one of those plays which go backward in time. Each of the two acts begins with a scene at the farmhouse and moves to a scene four days later at a gallery in London, where Jonathan is being interviewed by an aggressive young German woman (Laura Linney)—one of those high-powered European media academics—whose cordiality is matched only by her desire to unmask him as a charlatan. The second half of each act takes us back to the farmhouse and then, farther back, to a period some fifteen years before. It sounds complicated, but you’re left with a marvelous, symmetry-induced feeling of serenity.
I’m sure there are clever things to note about the play—the way the plot hinges on a painting that we never see (though we constantly see people looking at it), or the use Margulies makes of the notion of archeology (digging up the past)—but as I watched it I remember thinking mostly about how good Michael Bloom’s direction was, and about how the play’s ability to affect us derives from disclosures of where things started and where they went. I remember realizing how essential it is to see “Sight Unseen” performed, because if Mr. Boutsikaris were not right there in front of you, managing to be both sympathetic and ingeniously untouched by everything anyone says to him, you’d feel sorry for Jonathan. Similarly, you need Miss Hedwall’s performance to show what the girlfriend was like fifteen years earlier, and the performances of Mr. De Vries and Miss Linney to show how swiftly the husband and the journalist can oscillate between rage and passivity, say, or candor and spite. And because of the way the flip side of James Youmans’ turntable set would silently change into something else while we were watching a scene, I remember thinking, How do they do that?
The meticulous casting and tight direction of this production reminded me—no doubt because so much of “Sight Unseen” takes place in England—of all that staid Brit theater which the M.T.C. stages with such accuracy and devotion. Like many people, I suspect, I’ve been rolling my eyes heavenward every time I hear about one of its upcoming main-stage productions of Ayckbourn or Simon Gray or imitation Simon Gray. I’ve come to regard such programming as the price the company has to pay for success—for having a large and well-established pool of longtime subscribers. But if you think of such Anglophile fare as practice for mounting a “Sight Unseen” in the smaller, developmental space, then you have to say it’s worth it.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, February 3, 1992