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Sight Unseen
Jonathan Waxman is the artist as superstar, plunged into the exorbitant hype of the American art world where a publicist is as necessary as a brush and canvas. Just before his works are celebrated at an exhibition in London, Jonathan journeys to the village where his former lover, Patricia, lives with her British husband, Nick. Archaeologists working on a dig, their spare existence is spent sifting through a Roman rubbish heap to discover the past. In their cold, remote house, Jonathan discovers an early painting of Patricia he'd done when they were young lovers. The subsequent struggle for the painting embodies the unreconciled passions of the past. Patricia has never forgiven Jonathan for leaving her, Nick despises Jonathan and the kind of art he produces, and Jonathan has never been able to recapture the inspiration and purity he felt when he painted Patricia. In taut scenes that dart from past to present and back, the characters are forced to deal with the unanswerable question of anti-Semitism, the legacy of the Holocaust and assimilation, the sadness of lost love, the role of the artist and the location of the human soul at the end of a ragged century.
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
About the author
Donald Margulies
37 books26 followersBorn in Brooklyn in 1954, Donald Margulies grew up in Trump Village, a Coney Island housing project built by Donald Trump's father. Margulies was exposed early to the theatre. His father, a wallpaper salesman, played show tunes on the family hi-fi and, despite a limited income, often took his children to Manhattan to attend Broadway plays and musicals.
Margulies studied visual arts at the Pratt Institute before transferring to State University of New York to pursue a degree in playwriting. During the early 80s, he collaborated with Joseph Papp, and his first Off-Broadway play, Found a Peanut, was produced at the Public Theatre. In 1983, he moved with his wife to New Haven, Connecticut, so that she could attend Yale Medical School.
In 1992, Margulies' career really began to take off when Sight Unseen won an Obie for Best New American Play. Some of his other plays include The Loman Family Picnic; Pitching to the Star; Zimmer; Luna Park; What's Wrong With This Picture?; The Model Apartment; Broken Sleep; July 7, 1994, and The God of Vengeance. Dinner With Friends--which tells the story of a seemingly happy couple who re-examine their own relationship when their best friends decide to divorce--won Margulies a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He had previously been nominated for a Pulitzer for Collected Stories, a play about a Jewish writer who is betrayed by her young disciple.
Elected to the Dramatists Guild Council in 1993, Margulies has received grants from Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS), New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His plays have premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Jewish Repertory Theatre. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.
Margulies studied visual arts at the Pratt Institute before transferring to State University of New York to pursue a degree in playwriting. During the early 80s, he collaborated with Joseph Papp, and his first Off-Broadway play, Found a Peanut, was produced at the Public Theatre. In 1983, he moved with his wife to New Haven, Connecticut, so that she could attend Yale Medical School.
In 1992, Margulies' career really began to take off when Sight Unseen won an Obie for Best New American Play. Some of his other plays include The Loman Family Picnic; Pitching to the Star; Zimmer; Luna Park; What's Wrong With This Picture?; The Model Apartment; Broken Sleep; July 7, 1994, and The God of Vengeance. Dinner With Friends--which tells the story of a seemingly happy couple who re-examine their own relationship when their best friends decide to divorce--won Margulies a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He had previously been nominated for a Pulitzer for Collected Stories, a play about a Jewish writer who is betrayed by her young disciple.
Elected to the Dramatists Guild Council in 1993, Margulies has received grants from Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS), New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His plays have premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Jewish Repertory Theatre. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 8, 2016
Good play. And I even found a good monologue for auditions. :)
January 11, 2018
It’s never good when, only a few weeks after reading a play, the title doesn’t ring a bell and, once it does, I can’t remember anything about the plot.
Thanks, Wikipedia, for providing enough of a summary for me to remember that, yes, I have read this play, and yes, I do remember enough of the plot to write a review.
Sight Unseen is about an artist and his former lover, and it has some good moments and an interesting driver to the plot. The play is good but not great (hence totally forgetting I had read it only a few weeks after the fact – and I usually have a creepy good memory when it comes to books). Old lovers reuniting is a common theme – if you haven’t seen the The Song of Lunch with Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson, you’re missing out (it’s essentially a film set to a poem! With good actors!) – and Sight Unseen doesn’t have enough to make it stand out as new or different. Quasi-recommended.
Thanks, Wikipedia, for providing enough of a summary for me to remember that, yes, I have read this play, and yes, I do remember enough of the plot to write a review.
Sight Unseen is about an artist and his former lover, and it has some good moments and an interesting driver to the plot. The play is good but not great (hence totally forgetting I had read it only a few weeks after the fact – and I usually have a creepy good memory when it comes to books). Old lovers reuniting is a common theme – if you haven’t seen the The Song of Lunch with Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson, you’re missing out (it’s essentially a film set to a poem! With good actors!) – and Sight Unseen doesn’t have enough to make it stand out as new or different. Quasi-recommended.
February 17, 2019
Second Margulies play I’ve read recently and REALLY liked. It’s structure is non-linear, but so compelling and fulfilling. Glad to read it after seeing its revival at the Biltmore in the early 2000s.
November 14, 2021
Well. The main female character is very blah. The kind you'd be 180% sure was written by a man in the late 20th century. But that is what she is, after all.
Great humor in the play, very good rhythm.
Great humor in the play, very good rhythm.
August 1, 2012
Very interesting relationships with some gripping scenes that hurt due to the characters raw honesty but I have no clue what the play's theme is and the fractured structure does not offer any hint. Any time a play chooses a non-linear structure there is the expectation that the time-jumps will work to prove a premise. That isn't the case here. The structure feels arbitrary. It fails to reveal a protagonist and works to present the key conflict as static. Still, Margulies writes very honest characters whose tactics in dealing with each other are surprising without being implausible.
March 30, 2012
Artist Jonathan reunites with a long-lost love. But to what purpose? To catch up on old times, or steal away the one painting that gave him a sense of grounding in both his life and heritage? Marguiles draws up some bitter conclusions about the artist's need to capitalize and cannibalize on themselves and loved ones, but this play is worth reading, if only for its final scene, one of the loveliest scenes of introduction I've ever read.
October 18, 2015
It wasn't bad, but it was extremely mediocre. I listened to it on audiobook -- it was given a bit of extra life by Adam Arkin and an excellent cast. But the whole purpose of the play was unclear, and it felt like spinning wheels to some extent. The non-traditional format with the time swaps fell flat without a purpose. There were some definite high points, and I didn't strictly dislike it, but it was a far cry from great.
January 26, 2012
Read this in one sitting. Pretty mediocre.
I'm over plays where the woman's sole purpose is to be a foil for the male. The woman who can't move on. Where are the strong women characters in plays? Do we always have to be victims of lovelorn shit and unrequited love? Fuck that.
The 2 stars are for the conversations about art. That was the most engaging element of the play for me.
I'm over plays where the woman's sole purpose is to be a foil for the male. The woman who can't move on. Where are the strong women characters in plays? Do we always have to be victims of lovelorn shit and unrequited love? Fuck that.
The 2 stars are for the conversations about art. That was the most engaging element of the play for me.
February 29, 2008
This play is tightly written and explores important and interesting issues about home and heritage and art. It is quick and deep -- contemporary to the core. I liked the structure of the scenes in different locations and back and forth in time and using a spare four characters.
June 9, 2012
I'm playing the role of Grete in this play this December. I'm really interested in the playwright's notes about Grete's fascination with Jonathan. Does she represent the educated or uneducated viewer of art? What is her role as the media?
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October 9, 2009Sight Unseen. by Donald Margulies (1998)
December 7, 2009
Very interesting. The play flips back and forth in time. It has a juggling of a broken relationship, artist's integrity, and anti-semitism.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews