RECENTLY, I had the good fortune to spent part of the day strolling through the Orange County Museum of Art’s Richard Diebenkorn exhibit. This enchanting show of the California painter’s Ocean Park paintings was even better because I took it in with a trained painter who could point out what I might have overlooked. That this former artist was the New York/New Haven playwright Donald Margulies made the afternoon even more delicious.
 |
| Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park, No. 129 |
The playwright was in the OC for a revival of his play Sight Unseen — which South Coast Repertory developed and premiered 20 seasons ago. David Emmes, company co-founder, directs, this time around, this play about a Brooklyn painter who’s visiting England at a moment of both triumph and doubt. My story is here.
Margulies — whose plays specialize in deeply uncomfortable tales of the creative class — turned out to be very good company. He talked about giving his students Eric Fischl paintings to spark writing a scene, and asks them to write a monologue from the point of view of a Diane Arbus portrait.
 |
| South Coast Rep, Costa Mesa |
And I can’t say anything more about this publicly, but I’m quite eager to see his work with HBO on an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex bear fruit.