THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Drawing on Familiar Obsessions : ‘Former Artist’ Writes Play for SCR That Parallels His Life--in Some Ways

Unlike many playwrights, Donald Margulies never was an actor. He once took an acting course, and he has done readings for friends as a lark. But the only time he ever appeared in a play, he recalls, was two years ago at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York.

“I went up on my lines horrendously,” he says.

Ironically, he’d written them.

“My co-star was a 9-year-old girl,” Margulies, 37, recounted the other day. “She stopped the show, saying, ‘That’s not your line.’ Since the play was a David Mamet parody, it had all this staccato (dialogue). She’d mastered everything, but I was just totally flummoxed.

“If I’m a former anything,” he noted, “I’m a former artist.”

Given the subject of his latest work--”Sight Unseen,” which opens Friday in a world premiere on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory--one might have guessed.

The drama takes as its central figure a Jewish-American painter who has rocketed to art-world stardom, making him unspeakably rich and more famous than he ever dreamed, but also desperate to reclaim what was genuine from his past.

Margulies, who locates his own ethnic roots in “the Lithuanian wing” of the Jewish Diaspora, was sitting on a hard-backed chair in an empty SCR conference room talking about himself and the play. He’d arrived at John Wayne Airport only an hour before on his fourth transcontinental flight in five days. Despite the commute between the theater and Yale University in New Haven, Conn., where he teaches an undergraduate writing seminar, he somehow looked fresh in a striped shirt and black jeans.

“I still draw occasionally, and I do collage with found papers,” the Brooklyn-born playwright said. “I wasn’t good in all art media. I was not a good sculptor. I was a mediocre painter. But I could draw very well, figurative drawing, and that was rewarded. It seemed to determine the first 20-odd years of my life in a facile kind of way.”

In no sense, however, is “Sight Unseen” a meditation on the road not taken--at least not in terms of Margulies’ own what-might-have-beens. Though he attended Pratt Institute, a specialized art college, on scholarship and supported himself for a few years as a graphics designer, he lost interest early on in striving for an artist’s career.

“I always had the itch to write. It was sort of a guilty pleasure.”

Moreover, while the first draft of the play started out in an “overtly autobiographical” mode, he said, it had very little to do with art and a lot to do with sexual awakening. He tossed out the entire draft anyway.

“I’d never done that before,” said Margulies, who counts “Sight Unseen” as his 16th produced play. “I felt like a real grown-up acknowledging that no matter how long I worked on the thing, it wasn’t going to be what I’d hoped it would. It was a coming-of-age story in the tritest sense. I rather glibly refer to it as ‘The Donald Chronicles.’ ”

That miscarried version--actually titled “Heartbreaker”--had almost a dozen characters, spanned several continents and told the picaresque story of a globe-trotting hero in straightforward narrative fashion.

By contrast, “Sight Unseen” is a three-character chamber piece that takes place chiefly in an English farmhouse, where the painter Jonathan Waxman has come to see a former girlfriend (now married to an archeologist), while his first European retrospective is being mounted at a London art gallery.

With a few scenes set elsewhere--at the gallery, an art studio, a bedroom--the play now unfolds like the dramatic equivalent of a collage: It makes abrupt leaps back and forth in time and deconstructs the story.

“The jumbled chronology seemed to suit the sort of memory play that I think this is,” Margulies said. “I frankly thought it should be ambiguous; it should be mysterious.

“Pieces should fall into place the way they would if you’re analyzing a painting. You scrutinize it and something makes sense in relation to something else, but not immediately. The juxtapositions give it resonance. I find that kind of theater exciting.”

In the meantime, he suggests, “Sight Unseen” still deals with all his familiar obsessions. “But they’re given voice in a very different way, in a more mature way. For me, this play represents a big leap. It feels like the beginning of a new chapter.”

The old chapter dealt with family subjects in various permutations. For instance, “Found a Peanut”--staged at New York’s Public Theatre in 1984 and two years later at the Back Alley Theatre in Los Angeles--is an allegory of childhood; “What’s Wrong With This Picture?,” produced at the Back Alley in 1988, at New York’s Jewish Repertory Theatre in 1990 and currently at San Diego’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, is a black comedy about death with a matriarch who returns from the grave.

“The Model Apartment,” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1988, is about a pair of Holocaust survivors and their daughter, who is instilled with the legacy of the Holocaust, and “The Loman Family Picnic,” at Stage II of the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1989, is a social comedy, with a musical pastiche, that paid homage to “Death of a Salesman.”

When SCR commissioned Margulies to write a play back in 1988, the international art market was booming and the works of young contemporary artists were being auctioned for astonishing prices. Since then, however, the boom has fizzled--which forces the question of whether the tenor of “Sight Unseen” is already dated.

After all, the play not only revolves around a newly risen star whose unpainted pictures are worth boodles but intentionally calls to mind the ‘80s generation of superstars such as David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl.

“But I’m not too worried,” Margulies said, “because I think the issues of the play are still pertinent.” Besides, he added, Waxman “is a purely fictional creation” meant to stand on his own, apparent reflections in the real world notwithstanding.

He is less certain of what he will write next for the stage.

“Whenever I finish a play, I feel I’ll never write another,” he remarked. “I kind of close the book and say, ‘Well, that was a good career.’ In time, happily, I find something that stimulates me all over again.”

Previews of “Sight Unseen” begin today and continue through Thursday on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The regular run begins Friday and will continue through Oct. 20. Information: (714) 957-4033.