TEN UNKNOWNS. By Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Daniel Sullivan. With Donald Sutherland, Julianna Margulies, Justin Kirk, Denis O'Hare. Set by Ralph Funicello, costumes by Jess Goldstein, lights by Pat Collins, music by Robert Waldman, paintings by Daniel Adel. Lincoln Center at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, through April 15. Seen at Tuesday's preview.

DONALD SUTHERLAND shambles onto the Lincoln Center Theater's downstairs Newhouse stage and, in that instant, it becomes unthinkable that this deeply disarming and subversive talent has not forever been a New York theater presence. Except for a blip 20 years ago in Edward Albee's notorious Broadway adaptation of "Lolita," however, the actor has been a generational icon in more than 100 wonderful and terrible movies, voice-overs for auto ads and, finally last season, a praised appearance in a dismissed play in Los Angeles and London.

So here he is, hanging his long bones on an irresistible mess of a character named Malcolm Raphelson, the unfashionable American painter in Mexican self-exile in Jon Robin Baitz's promising but uneven new play "Ten Unknowns." Embodied with massively disaffected charm by Sutherland, the artist has been thrust back on the radar screen. The recluse looks a bit like Howard Hughes in a headlight, except that the overgrown, white-silver hair is sparkling, the rumpled ambivalence comes with a diabolical grin and, though the familiar face has a lived-in look, both painter and actor appear to have enjoyed much of the living.

The rest of the comeback-if, in fact, there ever was much of a career -is the subject of the play, which opened last night in Daniel Sullivan's good-looking but dislocated production with Julianna Margulies, the former Carol Hathaway from "ER," as the other live-from-Hollywood news. Margulies plays Julia, an oddly underdeveloped character, a biology grad student from Berkeley who stumbles into the drama while studying disappearing frogs.

Trust Baitz, with his rare combination of style and moral center, to take us to inner worlds worth traveling. The playwright seems heading out boldly to explore a world conflicted with questions about the tyranny of art fashion and quality, about the benefits and blind spots in the outsider sensibility, about the warring American impulses for good and for meddling.

Somewhere along the way, unfortunately, the least interesting road is chosen. He seems to give up on the texture of his characters and goes instead for a narrow, limiting drama about the authorship of the paintings Malcolm created after years of blocked bitterness. Margulies' Julia, meant to be a galvanizing presence, a conscience for all manner of endangered species, is reduced to the girl-boarder role. Worse, Baitz lets her be a prig and a scold.

The most compelling provocations are left to the South African-raised New York art dealer, Trevor Fabricant-played by Denis O'Hare with a febrile sense of his greed and his own terror. Even more compelling is Judd Sturges, the New York junky brat, sent by Trevor to be Malcolm's assistant and perhaps to get his own act together. Justin Kirk, an actor who seems never to take an easy role and never to fail to triumph, has both an edgy downtown detachment and a touching susceptibility to the authenticity of the art market's next diversion.

Baitz gives Judd some of the smartest lines but, again, loses much of the character's singularity by turning him into a prop in an ethical dilemma.

That dilemma-about who really painted the works-does not even spend enough effort on questions of ownership in collaborations. Instead, the drama comes down to a crossroad for Malcolm, a figurative artist whose 28-year-exile from the scene is explained as his being "cast out" by the abstract expressionists-what Judd calls "Pollock and his homies." Baitz has set the play in 1992, an awkward decision that can only be explained when one adds up the years between Malcolm's inclusion on a late WPA exhibit called "Ten Unknowns," his exile in 1964 and a workable age for the character's charisma.

Equally curious is the decision to show real paintings (by New York artist Daniel Adel) instead of leaving us to our own imaginations for grander vistas.

Ralph Funicello's set has the right disheveled look of a studio fueled by paint and mezcal, but Jess Goldstein's costumes for everyone except Malcolm are far too hot and heavy for anyone who spends more than a few moments in the humid country. We might be able to excuse Trevor's socks because he just arrived, but Judd's big work boots are a symbolic warning of the tepid climate ahead.