BATTLE OF THE EXES.('Sight Unseen,' Biltmore Theater, New York City)(Theater Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 07-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Can you still recall youth's special quality of hope--"the hope that stings like chlorine," as the novelist Nick Hornby beautifully put it? Too often, in the bewildering passage of time, promise, like some tributary of the spirit, gets diverted. Both desire and goodness dry up, and your best self becomes only a memory. This arid moral and emotional landscape is vividly re-created in Donald Margulies's subtle and outstanding "Sight Unseen." (The 1992 play is in revival at the Manhattan Theatre Club's Biltmore Theatre, under the impeccable direction of Daniel Sullivan.) Here, a wunderkind of American modern art, Jonathan Waxman (Ben Shenkman), who is in England for a retrospective of his work, walks into a threadbare farmer's cottage in Norfolk to visit Patricia (Laura Linney), his former muse and, in her words, "the sacrificial shiksa," whom he jilted fifteen years ago after a two-year romance. Patricia is living there, overseeing an archeological dig with her shy, ornery husband, Nick (the excellent Byron Jennings). Standing in the drab kitchen, Jonathan, a model of carefully calibrated urban chic in a gray scarf, a black turtleneck, and suede shoes, tries, and fails, to disarm Nick. "I'm kind of freezing," Jonathan announces--in this play, the internal climate is always chillier than the weather outside....

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