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Sight Unseen | Sunday, May 21st at 4:00pm

Hello Page 2 Stage Theater Enthusiasts,

Spring is in the air! No, really, it’s IN. THE. AIR…have you seen those pollen counts?! But it’s so worth it to see blooms all around, to smell jasmine in the evening, and to get to work reading our next play while we wait for the orange blossoms to unfurl! Please
read on for some information about our next play, how you can find a copy, and when we’ll be hosting the discussion!

Our next play, like our last, touches upon some difficult themes, but it has at its crux an exploration of love.

Sight Unseen, by Donald Margulies, had its premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, in 1991, four months before its January, 1992, New York premiere in New York. It was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer for Drama. (Margulies did take the prestigious award in 2000 for his play Dinner with Friends.)

In taut scenes that dart from past to present and back–and between rural England, London and New York–characters in the play 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.

Margulies was born and raised in Brooklyn, attended art school himself, and ultimately fell in love with playwriting, drawing from both his joy as a boy attending live theater in New York and from his pain growing up Jewish in a world that too often allows anti-Semitism to flourish. Much of his work incorporates explorations of what it means to be Jewish in America, but also what it means to be a son and a father. As Margulies says himself in the afterword of a collection of his plays (Sight Unseen and Other Plays,1995):
“In Sight Unseen, the father is offstage, a shadowy figure whose recent death jolts the protagonist, the painter Jonathan Waxman, into examining his loss of cultural identity and artistic purpose.” Love, too, matters in his work, and is explored in this play with a rawness that situates our connections to one another as deeply embedded in our culture, time and place.

Trying to find a copy of this play?

The front office has some copies you can purchase: email sarah@prospecttheaterproject.org

You can also get it directly from Dramatists Play Service for $13 + shipping. Be sure to do so soon as this method can take some time.

Another great way to find the play is by snagging a used copy online or in a cool store (that 1995 collection referenced above is sitting on a bookshelf on the second floor at Moe’s Books in Berkeley–why not make a day of it?).

We’ll be discussing this play after the matinee of the second week of performances, Sunday May 21. We should be getting underway after 4pm. As last time, we’ll meet in the new Annex Space!

Hope to see you there,

Scott & Shannon