Creative partnership fuels a fruitful output

They are the kind of moments that, when we brush against them accidentally, make us want to look away: An eager young student, confronting a condescending mentor. An estranged husband, stopping by to see his wife and -- after pleasantries -- browbeating her over what she’s telling their friends. Two ex-lovers, now married to other people, reconnecting uncomfortably and circling like tigers. The characters move from small talk to awkward terseness to full-on combat in a disturbingly life-like way.

Donald Margulies, the playwright who created these characters and their conflicts, doesn’t really take sides. He just hopes to keep the audience watching, neither turning away nor committing to a firm judgment.

“I don’t want the audience writing off anybody they see onstage,” says Margulies, 57, strolling through the Orange County Museum of Art show of Richard Diebenkorn paintings. “I think they’re always on somebody’s side, but their allegiances shift. I think that kind of ping-pong exists in real argument.”

Though Margulies’ characters bump against each other in unsettling ways -- there’s an agenda behind almost every encounter, like Pinter without the working-class menace -- it’s a relief to see that the writer himself is unguarded and seemingly uncalculating.

Margulies’ “Sight Unseen,” which recently opened in a revival at South Coast Repertory, the company that commissioned it more than two decades ago, is ripe with conflict.

Angst and interpersonal strain are recurring characters in the plays of Donald Margulies, but the playwright’s most productive artistic home has been more serene: The Costa Mesa theater has offered world premieres of four of his most important plays, including “Dinner With Friends,” winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. At South Coast Rep, Margulies says, “The psychological climate is so much lighter than the world of New York theater.”

His protagonists don’t always have such untroubled homecomings. In “Sight Unseen,” the key tension is in the heart of the play’s main character, Jonathan Waxman, a 40-ish painter visiting an old girlfriend who also served as his first muse.

To David Emmes, the play’s producing artistic director the first time around and now director for the revival, it’s about someone who has become more successful than he ever thought possible. “And you wonder, somewhere along the way, ‘Have I lost it?’ ” says the mellow, professorial company co-founder. “‘Have I gotten so caught up in the mill that I’ve lost my artistic fire?’ ”

Sudden inspiration

A Brooklyn native now living near Yale University, where he teaches, Margulies is a long way from home today. “I’m very excited right now,” he confides in a whisper, walking into one of the museum’s galleries of paintings by Diebenkorn, whose work he discovered as an art student.

With his black jeans, corduroy jacket and retro glasses, he could play the cool guy in a Woody Allen movie. And though his short hair is gray, almost white, he’s disarmingly boyish.

“Sight Unseen” started life in the late ‘80s, when Margulies, somewhere between a struggling and emerging writer in his mid-30s, drew the attention, and resulting commission, from South Coast Rep. Rewrites and workshops sharpened what was then called “Heartbreaker,” but the playwright says his nine scenes in the life of a Brooklyn painter were “stuck.”

At the time, Jonathan Waxman was too much like the man laboring to invent him, so Margulies tweaked his script just slightly, making this starving artist wealthy and successful enough to be hailed as a visionary in Sunday newspapers.

“When I made that decision,” he recalls, “I suddenly understood the play. It was a remarkable learning experience as a writer. Inspiration takes all kinds of forms. I made one decision, and the play happened.”

Saving three scenes from “Heartbreaker” and adding some new material -- none of it presented in chronological order -- this story became clear: It begins as Jonathan, who has just lost his dad and is about to become a father himself, arrives at the English farmhouse of Patricia, who has also since married. Her husband, a painfully shy archaeologist, greets this visitor from his wife’s past without much enthusiasm, and things go downhill from there.

Jonathan discovers that Patricia has held onto the painting in which his talents came together for the first time, a nude portrait of her. It becomes a kind of grail to the artist, who can’t quite explain, to himself or to her, why he’s sought out an old girlfriend, all these years later. But he is clearly trying to make amends. “We all have chapters in our lives that we look back on and feel we didn’t handle very well,” Margulies says.

Because of the play’s corkscrew structure, it’s only later that we see just how unpleasant and abrupt their breakup had been. “Those are scenes of conflict,” Margulies says. “Otherwise people are just sitting around having pleasant conversation. For me, that’s the fun part. It’s what keeps me going.”

Still, “Sight Unseen” -- like most of his work -- is far from a shouting match. “If people only blurted out what they’re thinking to each other.... I don’t think that really happens. It often takes people days or years to confront, if they ever do. Confrontation is something really delicate in theater -- you want it to be earned.”

Coming full circle

When the playwright polished and premiered “Sight Unseen” at South Coast Rep, it not only launched his career, it began a creative partnership that’s lasted for more than 20 years. SCR also commissioned and produced his “Collected Stories” and “Brooklyn Boy,” and some important work on “Dinner With Friends,” was done in Costa Mesa. “Shipwrecked! An Entertainment” was developed at the company’s Pacific Playwright’s Festival and made its world premiere on its stages.

So this new revival of “Sight Unseen” brings the writer full circle.

Emmes, who founded South Coast Rep with Martin Benson in 1964 and helped shape it into one of the nation’s finest regional theaters, generally works with a light touch. With Margulies’ work, he says, it’s doubly true.

“With Donald’s work, the characters are so well-drawn,” Emmes says. “There are plays that encourage a director to get more auteur-like, or to make a visual spectacle of it, or work with the music. But with Donald, the text is so primary, so dimensional, it would be wrongheaded to try to embellish.”

Instead, it’s about drilling into the script: “In rehearsal, we’re constantly digging deeper, trying to find layers with new meaning. If that works, everything else will follow.”

Margulies’ work is often defined, like Chekhov’s, by how much is left unsaid.

“How much of the subtext is revealed?” Emmes asks of Margulies’ scripts. “What’s really going on when they’re chatting? With good actors and well-drawn characters, that’s what the rehearsals are about -- trying to calibrate how much we reveal about what the motives are, how much we leave for the audience to figure out.”

For the revival, he says, his only significant change is in a set that, for some scenes, makes it look like the characters are inside an Abstract Expressionist painting.

“David brings a kind of avuncular support system,” Margulies says. “He stays out of the artist’s way. And he’s by nature an optimistic person -- that’s important in the uncertain days of developing a work.”

The physical distance from New York is important for developing new work, as well. “You still need the safety of being out of town to develop something,” Margulies says. “A play can be killed in New York -- it wouldn’t have a chance at a future life.” A place like SCR serves, through its workshops and play-development process, as a kind of incubator.

“That’s that basis for this very unlikely long-term relationship between this Brooklyn boy and this theater in Orange County,” he says.

But nothing lasts forever. “Sight Unseen” went up March 16 and could be the last work that Margulies, who is in demand both as a playwright and as an uncredited script doctor for television and film, brings to Costa Mesa.

(Though Variety has announced that Margulies is adapting Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer-winning novel “Middlesex” for HBO, neither the playwright nor the network will discuss it for the record. HBO will only say that the project is in development and that Margulies is attached.)

It could also be his last time working with Emmes, now 73, who moved aside at SCR last year and is now officially founding artistic director. But, Emmes says, “I earnestly hope not. Whether we support a new play from him, or bring some of the older ones back into our repertory. This is a really special relationship.”

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