SIGHT UNSEEN, Spring 2009
Production
Directed by Laura Lundy-Paine
Opening Night Benefit themed as an Art Auction
June 2009, Sellwood Masonic Lodge
JONATHAN Stephan Henry
PATRICIA Hadley Boyd
NICK Joe Bolenbaugh
GRETE Bridie Harrington
BOARD OPERATOR Alex Pasco
COSTUMES Anna Williams
LIGHTING Sam Holloway
HOUSE Ann Singer
SCENE Sue Romas
TECHNICAL DIRECTION Russ Romas
STAGE MANAGER Corinne Lowenthal
PROPS Kellee Boyer
RUN CREW Richard Castle, Lance Bennett
PRODUCTION Heather Lundy Kahl, Elisabeth Harvey,
Glenn McCumber
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Notes
Director's Notes
A relationship we can't forget. The conversation we always wished we'd had. The lover we left behind. Haven't we all wanted to go back?
Donald Margulies takes us into the 1980s art scene, where an artist could be catapulted into rock start status with the right agent and the right kind of provocative work. Jonathan Waxman is reminiscent of Julian Schnabel, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman and other fabulously popular artists of the era who commanded obscene amounts for each piece. These artists were criticized for basing their art on a cultural context rather than creating lasting work that could withstand the test of time. They were reaching for something different. Their art wasn't meant to last forever; it was meant as an expression of self.
As the daughter of an artist I am intrigued by the idea of visiting the past to see the origin of the artistic impulse and where it takes us. What series of events, including personal rejection and the impact of our religion and beliefs, lead us to become the people we are today? And do we punish ourselves by wishing the conflicts in our lives had resolved more easily, or do we celebrate the complexity of who we are because of those conflicts?
Sight Unseen asks these questions through Jonathan and Patricia as they reunite in a cold farmhouse in the English countryside, when so much has changed between them and yet they are and always will be inextricably linked.
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Lunacy's Notes
Our second show has been an expanding experience in the business of theatre. Lunacy's first production, Jack and Jill, embodied the thrill and wonder in creating a piece of theatre from nothing, and Sight Unseen is showing us how to take what we began last fall and shape the process into something that will serve us and our audiences through the years to come.
Looking at the story up close, one starts to notice questions emerging. In fact, questions are woven seamlessly from the first scene to the last. Sight Unseen is a smart play, aware of what it's asking and where it's leading. And if we're willing to take up the questions it extends, maybe, just maybe, it could change us into a better version of ourselves.
What a beautiful privilege it is to tell this story. Bringing the artists of our Opening Night Reception together with those of our Production Ensemble - following Donald Margulies into this collision of the fine and performing arts - has been Lunacy's most exciting and challenging experience to date.
Thank you for joining us on the adventure.
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Reviews
Sight Unseen receives a thoughtful production by Lunacy Stageworks.
The immensely successful urbane artist Jonathan Waxman arrives at a remote Norfolk, England, farmhouse to visit his one-time lover Patricia, who now lives here rather modestly with her shy archeologist husband. Jonathan and Patricia last saw each other 15 years earlier on the occasion of their rather emotionally trying breakup. Given this history, there is bound to be some awkwardness when these two come together again.
This is the intriguing situation that begins Donald Margulies' comedy-drama, character study, Sight Unseen, now receiving a thoughtful, if occasionally over-wrought, production, from Lunacy Stageworks.
After the ex-lovers' tense opening reunion, the play's action moves both forward and backwards in time. Margulies not only probes the complex emotional roots and repercussions of Jonathan and Patricia's failed relationship, but also uses these characters to explore the role of the artist in a celebrity-obsessed culture.
As Jonathan confronts Patricia and her husband, he finds himself confronting questions about the nature of his work as an artist, about his understanding of artistic truth, and about the relationship between artistic success and artistic integrity.
Patricia's retreat to a Norfolk farm may be her attempt to escape a society where everyone and everything is reduced to being a commodity, but, ironically, it was the non-Jewish Patricia who many years before had prompted Jonathan to abandon his close-knit Jewish family and community for the lure of adventure beyond the safety of home.
Now a success in that larger art/business world he's caught in an irresolvable quandary: he suffers from a deeply felt loss of identity and community but is unwilling to give up the fruits of the success that have led to this alienation.
What's to be done? Margulies offers no answers. He merely sets the problem within a human context, which, for the most part, director Laura Lundy-Paine and her cast efficiently translate into stage action.
The actors do a good job of unearthing the play's comic dimensions as well as the driving passions that motivate the characters. If anything, the production occasionally lacks nuance with the actors moving too quickly toward high-volume explosiveness. This is especially apparent in scenes when the fear of being overheard by off-stage characters should work more effectively as a restraint on volume if not intensity.
Stephan Henry gives us an earnest and intelligent Jonathan Waxman. The younger Jonathan that Henry portrays towards the play's end may be a bit forced, but his presentation of the artist throughout the rest of the play is generally solid - skillfully embodying the character's paradoxical mix of self-confidence verging on arrogance and vulnerability.
As Patricia, Hadley Boyd begins with a nice low-key quality, perhaps too low-key because it's hard to see the depths of Patricia's discomfort or what's at stake for her in the first scene. Although Boyd's Patricia has a likeable eccentricity about her, it is her strong-will that underlies the character throughout the various changes she undergoes during the course of the play.
Joe Bolenbaugh ably plays her laconic, inarticulate husband, Nick. Bolenbaugh's Nick may often be a quiet thoughtful presence on the margin of scenes, but in going brow to brow with Henry's Jonathan on several occasions, he displays a hidden animal fire.
Bridie Harrington fills out the cast as a German interviewer whose polite if insistently relentless line of questions angers Henry's Jonathan.
Taking on Margulies' small-cast, thought-provoking character study makes a lot of sense for a fledgling company with limited resources. Scene changes in this production may be a bit awkward and the lighting was a little out of whack at the start of the first act on opening night, but we forgive all that as we quickly become absorbed in the complexities of these contemporary characters.
- Richard Wattenberg
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The Emperor and His Clothes: Art for Art's Sake Doesn't Fly in Sight Unseen.
Lunacy Stageworks is working with a setup that absolutely screams "community theater." At the Sellwood Masonic Lodge, the audience sits in folding chairs, and sightlines aren't great. The stage is smack dab in the middle of what feels like a ballroom, whose high ceiling yawns over the production. These details make what Lunacy has actually accomplished all the more remarkable: Sight Unseen is a sophisticated script, which presupposes of its audience both intelligence and an attention span, and this relatively new company gives it a thorough, satisfying treatment.
Donald Margulies' script juxtaposes pointed questions about the value of art against a backdrop of uneasy and imperfect relationships. Set in the 1980s, the script's central character is a successful painter, Jonathan (Stephan Henry), who's visiting London for a retrospective of his work. While in England, he visits an old lover, Patricia (Hadley Boyd), an ex-pat living in the countryside with her husband, Nick (Joe Bolenbaugh). Jonathan is all smugness and smarm as he dodges Nick's questions about just how much money he actually makes off his paintings.
Later scenes cut to Jonathan's art opening, where a young German journalist (Bridie Harrington) interviews him. Through his dual interrogation by Nick and the journalist, Jonathan's ideas about his work are revealed, and they don't reflect well on him: He cheerfully profits off of his art-celeb status while refusing to acknowledge that "celeb," rather than "art," is the key element of his success (as evidenced by buyers' willingness to purchase paintings "sight unseen"). The conversation between Jonathan and the journalist is both fascinating and uncompromising - here, "art for art's sake" just isn't good enough.
Playwright Margulies presents the audience with a handful of ways of excavating and understanding the past: Clues are found in photographs, old relationships are mined for the details they contained, paintings refuse to reveal their meanings, and entire civilizations are physically unearthed (Patricia and Nick are archeologists). It's a dense and heady script, and under the brisk direction of Laura Lundy-Paine, Lunacy Stageworks renders the material accessible. (A bit too accessible, at times - an unwelcome note of melodrama creeps in around the upper registers.) But if this is what community theater looks like? More, please.
- Alison Hallett
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