About the Play:

Sight Unseen has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues, Female/Male Scenes, Male/Male Scenes, and Three-Person Scenes.

Sight Unseen is a full-length comedic drama by Donald Margulies. Celebrated painter Jonathan Waxman reconnects with his former lover Patricia, only to do battle with her over a painting he'd made of her when they were a couple. Sight Unseen is a moody, intelligent meditation on modern art, money, love, and the creative process and the ways in which they are inextricably entangled.

Sight Unseen is the story of an American mega-artist so successful he's had the obligatory profile in Vanity Fair and can claim astronomical prices for his works sight unseen from a waiting list of wealthy patrons. Jonathan Waxman is the artist as superstar, plunged into the exorbitant hype of the American art world where a publicist is as necessary as a brush and canvas. Just before his works are celebrated at an exhibition in London, Jonathan journeys to the village where his original muse and former lover, Patricia, lives with her British husband, Nick. Archaeologists working on a dig, their spare existence is spent sifting through a Roman rubbish heap to discover the past. In their cold, remote house, Jonathan discovers an early painting of Patricia he'd done when they were young lovers. The subsequent struggle for the painting embodies the unreconciled passions of the past. Patricia has never forgiven Jonathan for leaving her, Nick despises Jonathan and the kind of art he produces, and Jonathan has never been able to recapture the inspiration and purity he felt when he painted Patricia, the "sacrificial shiksa" whom he abandoned in his quest for the opulent life which now devours him. In taut scenes that dart from past to present and back, the characters are forced to deal with the unanswerable question of anti-Semitism, the legacy of the Holocaust and assimilation, the sadness of lost love, the role of the artist and the location of the human soul at the end of a ragged century.

Sight Unseen premiered in 1991 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. The author's breakthrough play, it was produced Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage II in 1992, and was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Winner of the 1992 Obie Award. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional repertory, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"…you can tell when a play has gripped its audience, for no one seems to breathe, let alone shift in his seat. This phenomenon can be observed…at Sight Unseen, a smart and sad comedy by Donald Margulies." — New York Times

"You certainly should catch…the exciting Sight Unseen." — New York Magazine

"This close-up view of an artist whose fame and fortune have been exacted at a terrible price still has the power to move." — Backstage

About the Playwright:

Donald Margulies is an American playwright, screenwriter, and a professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale University. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000 for his play, Dinner With Friends. Other plays include Pulitzer Prize finalists Sight Unseen and Collected Stories. He has also developed screenplays for HBO, NBC, Paramount, Propaganda, Touchstone, Warner Bros., TriStar and Universal.