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...Compared to Dividends and Beau Jest, Sight Unseen is a complex and disturbing play, its dialogue capable of cutting surprises...

...His Jewishness presumably...

...A writer-in-residence at the Jewish Repertory Theatre, Margulies has taken up the problem of assimilation for the Jewish artist in Sight Unseen, which was commissioned by the South Coast Repertory in California, where it played last fall...

...First produced last season at New York's Jewish Repertory Theatre, Dividends is about a struggling artist—no Jonathan Waxman, he—who rediscovers his Jewish heritage in the course 20: 28 February 1992 Commonweal of arranging for the bar mitzvah of his ailing grandfather, who missed his as a boy working long hours on the Lower East Side...

...That is even more the case with James Sherman's Beau Jest, which seems to have settled into a comfortable off-Broadway run, only here the recognition is of the familiar conflicts between a grown daughter and the expectations of her parents...

...The point about Margulies as dramatist is that he created four interesting characters and set up scenes in which they played well off one another, or in which three of these took turns playing off Jonathan Waxman, the central character...

...Now married to Nick and to her archaelogical work, Patricia pretends to have buried the past, but she will not give Jonathan the forgiveness he wants, presumably to validate his success...

...One comes away from the theater wondering if the dramatist used this device to disguise a fairly conventional self-doubt play...

...There is pot enough gained by the juxtaposition of the out-of-sequence scenes...

...He is in London for his first European retrospective, which should be a moment of great triumph, but the recent death of his father, who never understood what he was up to, has made Waxman question his work and his life...

...One of the problems is that Margulies has chosen to present the events out of sequence, playing with chronology in the present as well as the past...

...To still their disapproval of her gentile boyfriend, the daughter hires an actor (also a shegetz as it turns out) to play her Jewish doctor suitor...

...With so much going for Sight Unseen, I still understand my Friend's doubt about the play...

...Jonathan Waxman, when we meet him, is the latest celebrity artist, a media-labeled "visionary," whose very large and presumably shocking canvases are so in demand that the art patrons are lined up for still unpainted works...

...Although he is seen as a critic of contemporary society, he is unwilling to explain his works to Nick ("I'm not gonna tell you what to see"), who would not listen in any case, or to the German journalist who interviews him in two of the play's best sequences...

...The warm smiles that greeted the final curtain at the matinee I attended and the success of the show suggest that audiences, as usual, want to be cuddled...

...A production of Gary Richards's Dividends launched Theatre Ariel, a new group in Philadelphia "exploring the Jewish experience...

...Assimilation-problem comedies have been going around this season...

...Those questions, her very slick elegance, and the abrupt way she begins to rewind the tape after he stalks out, as though she had what she wanted, seem to confirm his reaction...

...American is the adjective, not Jewish, American," he tells the interviewer, whose questions he hears as "sneaky little Jew-baiting comments...

...Not that Margulies's themes are trivial...

...but the expression on Laura Linney's face at the end of the scene—at least, on the night I was there—suggests the interviewer's surprise at Waxman's response...

...I'm an American painter...

...The strange braying voice that Jon De Vries used when his character (Nick, the English archaeologist) attacked the protagonist seemed an odd choice, but he and the director (Michael Bloom) may have intended its abrasiveness as part of Nick's needling...

...The original idea sounds like a good one around which to build a comedy, but the result—although Sherman is a Second City veteran—has the sophistication of a 1950s' sitcom and a predictable parade of Jewish-family jokes...

...The Final scene is the first meeting of Patricia and Jonathan, and perhaps it is intended to work like the final scene of Harold Pinter's Betrayal in which, thanks to reverse chronology, the playfulness is darkly undercut by what is to come, which we have already seen...

...Patricia seduced him from his Jewish reluctance and was rejected by him two years later on the day he sat shiva at the death of his Jisapproving mother...

...GERALD WEALES Commonweal 28 February 1992: 21...

...His fame has brought him wealth, a gentile wife, pregnant with a son, and a farm near New Paltz, but something has been lost along the way...

...A nice ambiguity...

...STAGE IDENTITY CRISIS 'SIGHT UNSEEN,' 'DIVIDENDS,' & 'BEAU' It is easy to be unfair to Donald Margulies as a playwright— to say, as did the friend who accompanied me to Sight Unseen at the Manhattan Theatre Club, that the production was excellent but that he had doubts about the play...

...More important than the retrospective, for the play's sake, his English visit gives him a chance to see again the love of his youth ("the pioneer....The sacrificial shiksa who made your world safe for shiksas...

...What he does get—at Nick's insistence—is :he portrait he did of her when they first met, a work in which he sees the beginning of the artist (not the celebrity) that he became...

...The performers were indeed very good, and Lou Liberatore, substituting in the demanding leading role, was particularly impressive...

...That might be enough to ask of a playwright...

...And, of course, there is the good production...

...Judging by the sometimes vocal response of those around me, the play's chief appeal—nostalgia and food jokes—lies in its recognition quotient...

...The deception escalates as the courtship turns into an engagement and ends predictably with actor-gets-girl and the blessing of the parents, which indicates that there was never a problem to start with...

...Is the scene in Margulies's play to be read ironically as promise unfulfilled for both characters, or is it the First seduction of Jonathan from his Jewishness, a loss that so distresses him in the present although it is no greater loss than the one that Patricia suffered when he rejected her...