The Emperor and His Clothes

Lunacy Stageworks is working with a setup that
absolutely screams “community theater.” At the Sellwood Masonic Lodge,
the audience sits in folding chairs, and sightlines aren’t great. The
stage is smack dab in the middle of what feels like a ballroom, whose
high ceiling yawns over the production. These details make what Lunacy
has actually accomplished all the more remarkable: Sight Unseen is a sophisticated script, which presupposes of its audience both
intelligence and an attention span, and this relatively new company
gives it a thorough, satisfying treatment.

Donald Margulies’ script juxtaposes pointed questions about the
value of art against a backdrop of uneasy and imperfect relationships.
Set in the 1980s, the script’s central character is a successful
painter, Jonathan (Stephan Henry), who’s visiting London for a
retrospective of his work. While in England, he visits an old lover,
Patricia (Hadley Boyd), an ex-pat living in the countryside with her
husband, Nick (Joe Bolenbaugh). Jonathan is all smugness and smarm as
he dodges Nick’s questions about just how much money he actually makes
off his paintings.

Later scenes cut to Jonathan’s art opening, where a young German
journalist (Bridie Harrington) interviews him. Through his dual
interrogation by Nick and the journalist, Jonathan’s ideas about his
work are revealed, and they don’t reflect well on him: He cheerfully
profits off of his art-celeb status while refusing to acknowledge that
“celeb,” rather than “art,” is the key element of his success (as
evidenced by buyers’ willingness to purchase paintings “sight unseen”).
The conversation between Jonathan and the journalist is both
fascinating and uncompromising—here, “art for art’s sake” just
isn’t good enough.

Playwright Margulies presents the audience with a handful of ways of
excavating and understanding the past: Clues are found in photographs,
old relationships are mined for the details they contained, paintings
refuse to reveal their meanings, and entire civilizations are
physically unearthed (Patricia and Nick are archeologists). It’s a
dense and heady script, and under the brisk direction of Laura
Lundy-Paine, Lunacy Stageworks renders the material accessible. (A bit
too accessible, at times—an unwelcome note of melodrama creeps in
around the upper registers.) But if this is what community theater
looks like? More, please.