Playwright Donald Margulies has packed this tightly scripted comedy/drama with more humorous dialogue, more poignant scenes and more bittersweet feelings than you'd find in three or four other plays combined.
With only four characters (all very well defined) and eight scenes - shifting forward and backward across 17 years of time - Margulies touches on everything from obscenity (both financial and artistic) to self-worth, marriage, divorce and death.This 1992 "best play" Obie winner was, after all, a Pulitzer Prize nominee. It lost to the marathon "Kentucky Cycle."
The central character is successful, wealthy painter Jonathan Waxman, who has reached the point in his career that there's even a global waiting list of anxious buyers - all willing to purchase one of his originals . . . sight unseen.
As the play opens, Waxman (superbly played by Kris Nelson), has arrived in London for an opening of his first European retrospective. His widowed father has just died, and Waxman's second wife, who has stayed behind in the States, is just a few weeks away from giving birth to their first child.
In a chilly Norfolk farmhouse, an hour out of London, Waxman is meeting his former college lover - expatriate Patricia - and her painfully shy archaeologist husband, Nick (both nicely played by Michelle Peterson and Jon Clark).
Loosen Nick up a bit with a few glasses of wine or stout, and he quickly shifts into an argumentative mood, brazenly questioning Jonathan's talent in modern art.
Two short scenes also provide a brief subplot - interviews with journalist Grete (Lilliana Cabal). The question-and-answer sessions escalate into a somewhat vicious debate between the two. As a German, does she have an agenda aimed at discrediting Waxman's theories just because he is Jewish?
From Nick and Patricia's simple farmhouse there are also flashbacks to 15 years earlier, when Jon's mother died, and two years before that, when Jon and Patricia, then young and adventurous, first met during an art class at college.
Marilyn Holt has directed with her usual skill, honing a cast that delivers flesh-and-blood characters who are emotionally complex - not just cardboard cutouts, but people you really care about.
The intimate Downstairs space doesn't permit an expansive set, but Kevin Myhre's scenery allows the quick shifting of scenes from the simply furnished farm home to a London art gallery, to Jon's Brooklyn bedroom and a New York art studio.