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

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.

No sooner is the evening roast in the oven than the mitts are off; the old war between the former lovers flares up. Jonathan claims that he has returned to apologize for his poor treatment of Patricia. Her wound is still raw. "I'll give you dinner and a place to spend the night, but, no, Jonathan, I won't forgive you," she says. In the pas de deux of regret and recrimination that follows, Shenkman and Linney play expertly together; they're swift and smart, and they make their quicksilver shifts of mood sparkle with nervy implication. Shenkman has a cool, charming demeanor that manages to convey both intelligence and smugness. He exudes the practiced containment and the droll self-effacement of the well publicized. His fame? "It's all timing and luck," he says. His millions? "Numbers don't mean anything."

Jonathan is in demand; Patricia's in retreat. His spruce outline announces a certain appetite for the world. Patricia's bagginess broadcasts her abdication from it. She wears no makeup; she dresses in unshapely work pants and a loose-fitting red sweater. She's washed out, and she wears her exhaustion like a badge of honor. The bleakness of her environment--"Pretend you're comfortable," she tells Jonathan--mirrors her emotional impoverishment, an interior unease that she rationalizes as a sort of hair-shirted pioneer strength. "I like it here," she says. "I like the struggle! I like surviving obstacles. Hell, I survived you, didn't I?" But she has survived by withdrawing from contemporary life; her obsession now is with medieval trash. She says, "I prefer my bones and coins and petrified cherry pits"--things that have been tossed aside, as she was. "I never thought you'd be capable of something like this," Jonathan tells her. "You were such a passionate girl, Patty." She says, "My 'passion' nearly did me in now, didn't it?"

Patricia has cured her heart by killing it. "He absolutely adores me," she says of Nick. But being idolized is not the same as being seen; only Jonathan actually knew her. "The connection was electric," she says of their former relationship. "I could see the sparks. I never felt so alive." The existence she has constructed now is entirely defensive--not so much a life as a living death. She has settled for someone she can control and keep, someone who will serve her desires but demand nothing for himself. When she arrives home to find Jonathan in her kitchen, she has one word--"Go"--for her husband, who does as he's told. "I take what I can get, I'm English," he later tells Jonathan, a brilliant line that establishes at a stroke both his pessimism and hers.

Margulies's cunning structure allows "Sight Unseen" to unfold rather like an archeological dig. Cutting back and forth from the kitchen reunion to Jonathan's London exhibition and to earlier scenes in Jonathan and ...