SIGHT UNSEEN.(Theater review)

A good playwright always signals his theme, if only obliquely, in the first exchanges of a play. In the opening scene of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," for instance, a sentinel on the parapets in the dark cries out, "Who's there?" The question lies behind all of Hamlet's subsequent antic behavior: is anyone who he seems? Likewise, at the beginning of Joe Orton's "Loot," a credulous widower, whose son will soon bury stolen money in his mother's coffin, is approached by a nurse. "Wake up. Stop dreaming," she says, signalling the ferocious attack on received opinion that follows.

"Just looking" are the first words directed at Omar, the savvy phone salesman and bisexual hustler in Alan Ball's fascinating "All That I Will Ever Be" (deftly directed by Jo Bonney, at the New York Theatre Workshop). Looking, of course, is not the same as seeing; here, Omar (the subtle, edgy Peter Macdissi), a foreigner of Middle Eastern origin in the era of post-September 11th suspicion, is as objectified as the phones he sells. He is invited into the homes of others for sexual encounters, but he is never seen as a human being. "That's it, fuck me, Osama! Sandnigger!" one of Omar's tricks, the disenchanted, lost Dwight (Austin Lysy), says. Later, as the two begin to form an emotional attachment, Dwight asks, "Can you imagine what it must be like, to live without people you don't even know hating you because of what you are?" "No," Omar replies. At once defended and desolate, Omar struggles under the weight of others' preconceptions. "Maybe . . . I'm plotting along with all the other crazy sandniggers to bring America to its knees, while the rest of the world cheers," he jokes to Dwight. Dwight is not amused; if Omar were a terrorist, Dwight tells him, he'd turn him in.

In a series of mostly taut and well-written encounters, Omar finds himself variously ignored, abandoned, and paid to leave. His particularly robust sexual expertise is a testament to his desire to find a place for himself in the alien American landscape, to root himself somehow in the imagination of another person--in "that secret place in him," he says, "that's just like that secret place in me." A genuine note of excitement seeps into Omar's guarded badinage when he describes giving oral sex as "feeling the power of all creation fill you up until you are all creation" and "just losing yourself in the fact that you are right up there in the gate of fucking life, and you get to drink it up all you want." This last evocation of erotic intimacy is addressed to a female African-American studio executive whom Omar picks up. "Are you for real?" she says. Omar, a protean figure, eager to be mirrored back, answers, "You tell me."

Ball, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for "American Beauty" (1999) and who conceived and produced the Emmy Award-winning TV series "Six Feet Under," knows how to build a scene and how to make his sentences pop; his narrative authority gives the audience confidence that Omar's perplexing and prickly contradictions--his fear of being looked at, his longing to be looked after--will eventually lead to a satisfying psychological revelation. And they do. Omar's defense against the humiliation of his invisibility in American society is to lie about his identity. "I'm from wherever you want me to be from," he tells one trick. In the course of the play, he claims to be French, Egyptian, Greek, Saudi, Iranian, Puerto Rican, and Algerian. The truth is finally coaxed out of him in a pivotal, postcoital scene with Raymond (the compelling David Margulies), an avuncular, well-travelled widower and father of three, who guesses that Omar is not the "Arabian stallion" he's advertised to be on the Internet. Under Raymond's sympathetic gaze--"We deserve to be loved, purely and unconditionally, just for who we are," he tells Omar in passing--Omar admits his origins and even his reasons for leaving his past behind. "I am ashamed of it," he says, adding, "I miss having a family, but . . . I don't miss my family." Raymond, who has come to terms with the loss of his beloved wife, with his ...