 |
| Photo By Sandy Underwood |
|
Drew Fracher, Sherman Fracher and Chris Clavelli are a tight ensemble cast for Sight Unseen at ETC.
|
With the opening of Donald Margulies' 1991 play,
Sight Unseen, Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC) leaps back to the top of its frequently impressive game -- after a serious stumble with last fall's
Thirty Ghosts. The Obie-winner and Pulitzer-nominated script, the illuminating direction (D. Lynn Meyers), the stark sets and lighting (Brian c. Mehring), the so-right-it's-faintly-satiric costuming (Mark Sorenson), the supporting soundscape (Fitz Patton) and four powerful, splendidly etched acting performances coalesce into a stunning evening of theater. Thanks, guys.
At its topmost level the play's title refers to the rage of success that painter Jonathan Waxman is experiencing. Museums, corporations and collectors queue up to pay $250,000 in advanc e for his canvasses, "sight unseen." But that's only the play's surface. At other, inner levels it might as readily be titled "glances un-examined," "glimpses unexplored" or, better, "depths un-delved." Like Margulies' Pulitzer winner, Dinner With Friends (produced by ETC three seasons ago), this is a play of relationships forming and dissolving -- told in hints, promises, half sentences and tantalizingly half-explored scenes. The play is very like something Margulies has Jonathan say of his pictures. He paints, he says, and the viewer must interpret. Art is a two-party process. What the picture means to the painter is not the point. If and when it means something to the viewer -- whatever that meaning might be -- that's what it means and that's when it achieves validity and becomes art. Both valid and artful, Sight Unseen will provoke as many meanings as it will have viewers during its three-week run.
While in college, student painter Jonathan (Chris Clavelli) meets student dilettante Patricia (Sherman Fracher). They engage in an intense two-year affair that suits her well but scathes at his traditions. He is Jewish; she is not. He breaks off the affair, rather cruelly. She goes to study in England, seeking escape from both Jonathan and a deteriorating family situation. When her student visa lapses, she marries archeologist Nick (Drew Fracher) to stay in England; 15 years elapse. Jonathan, now a success and married to a non-Jewish girl, comes to London for a major gallery exhibition of his work. He arranges to visit Patricia and meet Nick at the remote archeological dig where they live in genteel poverty as they sift shards of the past in a Roman garbage dump Nick has discovered.
How apt a metaphor -- sifting the past. Six of the play's eight, taut scenes, arranged in time-bending order (as in Dinner with Friends) reveal effects, then jump backward to examine causes. In the other two Jonathan is verbally ambushed and stripped of some comfortable pretenses by a genuinely pretentious German writer (a. Beth Harris.)
Jonathan's visit to Patricia is a disaster. Threatened, Nick opens up his genuine dislike for the painter. Deeply wounded, Patricia discovers she has never recovered from Jonathan's rejection but might now be discovering an increased affection for her husband. Challenged by everyone else, Jonathan is revealed as perhaps something less than the pure artist he thinks himself to be, above crass commercialism. His truer colors come to light when he's caught sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with a picture of Patricia he had painted and given to her years earlier. What he's stealing is not so much a canvas as a missing part of his past.
Because their work so exemplifies the level of integrated, ensemble performance for which ETC is named and toward which it strives, I won't comment on the four actors -- or compliment them -- individually. Each does excellent work, but their individual excellence is both a reflection and a result of their hitchless integration. Performances rise and fall in pitch together; they speed and slow in lockstep. Together they create a tantalizing and exhilarating work of art. Grade: A
SIGHT UNSEEN continues at Ensemble Theatre through Feb. 13.
