One month after Arizona Theatre Company staged “Permanent Collection,” a rumination on fine art and racial tensions, comes Actors Theatre with another thought-provoking drama centering on the art world, Donald Margulies’ “Sight Unseen.”

Comparisons abound. Both plays center on minorities in art. They share unusually similar riffs on the gift shop-ization of the modern art museum. Most important, they’re not really about art, per se, as much as using it as a backdrop to explore the human condition.

But whereas Thomas Gibbons’ “Permanent Collection” plays a frustratingly delicious game of tossing out unanswerable questions like impossible riddles — making for a somewhat unsatisfying evening of theater — Margulies’ play traffics in more fulfilling stuff, a portrait of the compromises one makes in life, knowingly or unknowingly, and the successes and tragedies that occur as a result.

Enter, stage left: Jonathan Waxman, an acclaimed, wealthy Jewish-American painter who finds himself struggling for identity and inspiration in the face of waning buzz and the recent death of his father. He’s still famous, mind you, and commands top dollar for his works. But something is missing. He retraces his roots and ends up at the door of his college sweetheart, shiksa Patricia ... and the gruff, burly man she later married for convenience.

The threesome’s interactions — by turns tense, hilarious and telling — are intercut with scenes that find Jonathan justifying his artistic career to a probing German arts journalist and others that transport Jonathan and Patricia back to their earlier days together. Questions are raised: Is Jonathan a sellout? Is it art or commerce? Is his Jewish heritage a guiding factor in his work? In his love life? Is he really in love?

By fiddling with chronology, Margulies reveals in deft layers a woman whose neediness has been satiated in a sad act of settling and an artist who got the success he wanted, only to discover it didn’t quite fill his life’s missing pieces. And in the end, audiences are given a moment of tenderness that strips away to a tragic realization: These are people living doomed lives.

Because “Sight Unseen” juggles so many levels, it’s largely forgivable that some of the acting and directing choices don’t fit.

More than a decade since he staged the play with the same leads for Arizona Jewish Theatre, Actors Theatre honcho Matthew Wiener here paints in broad strokes, allowing his cast to play an intimate drama with the arm-waving bigness of Shakespeare. Thoughtful pronouncements — and Margulies offers scads — are delivered by having characters stand up, move to the front of the stage and gaze out into the audience.

Though he’s a talented actor with a commandingly natural style, as Jonathan, actor Nick Glaeser has an affable, outgoing, slicked-back charm that seems better suited to a car salesman than a hip New York artist. (Perhaps this is a tip-off for the audience: Jonathan is more about marketing than artistry.) Meanwhile, Patricia is played by Maria Amorocho with a puppy dog's annoying ebullience she mistakes for capriciousness. And Natalie Messersmith’s German interviewer, thanks to severe makeup and wardrobe choices, is played more for laughs than drama.

Then there’s Ben Tyler, as a rural Englishman-turned-archaeologist and Patricia’s husband, delighting in the tense silences and stony glares as much as his glib remarks to Jonathan, the man who still seems to claim his wife's heart. There’s a gleeful joy in watching Tyler in an opening scene, chomping cookies while quietly appraising Jonathan, letting the crumbs fall from his beard, bouncing off his belly like boulders falling down a mountainside. It’s like sharing a moment with Richard Attenborough coming off a Quaalude.

Problems that nag across the first act magically melt away to reveal what amounts to a riveting second half, in which Wiener and company settle into a taut groove. Layers are stripped away and covered again, giving audiences new information to weigh against whatever notions they had about Jonathan, his art and his relationship with Patricia.

We know this much: After what Jonathan goes through in “Sight Unseen,” his art will never be the same. He’s gone looking for the soul that grounds his work, and, having seen it, now realizes the painful truth: Sometimes the most damning thing is getting what you want.