Arthur Miller's 'The Price' makes its Off-Broadway debut

 

I have always liked and loved most of Arthur Miller’s plays since I encounter my first, Death of a Salesman, at Baltimore’s Center Stage when I was in high school. The exception has always been, and remains, his 1968 play The Price, which director Noelle McGrath has revived at Theatre at St. Clement’s.  To my surprise, this is its first Off-Broadway production.

Last revived on Broadway in 2017, the story features, as so many of Miller’s plays do, the relationship between brothers.  In The Price, set in the late 1950s, they are Victor Franz, a 50-year-old downtrodden New York police sergeant ready to retire after 28 years on the force, and his successful older brother, Walter, a rich surgeon.  They haven’t seen each other or spoken in 16 years.  They are brought together in the attic of their once prosperous family’s condemned brownstone on the West Side of Manhattan to clear out decades of their stored possessions.  The Village Theater Group’s set, with props and effects by BB Props, is chuck-full of living and dining room furniture and all that goes with it, lamps, bric-a-brac, an old radio and Victrola, with an annoying Laughing Record.  On the surface the price is about how much the men will get for all of it but as the play unfolds we learn that the deeper price revolves around the choices each has made.

In no other Miller play involving brothers are the two so opposite.  Walter is aggressive and conniving, Victor is loyal and unambitious, having given up his opportunities for success to take care of their professionally and financially defeated father.  

In the talky first act Victor (Bill Barry) and his wife, Esther (Janelle Farias Sando) look over the clutter of possessions that trigger memories of long ago, the hovering weight of the past being another Miller theme.  Humor, a third element of most of Miller’s work, interjects in both acts in the form of an 89-year-old used furniture dealer, Gregory Solomon (Mike Durkin), who also offers some of the wisdom associated with his biblical name.

“People don’t live like this no more.  This stuff is from another world.  So I’m trying to give you a modern viewpoint, and if you won’t understand the viewpoint is impossible to understand the price.”

 

At the close of Act One, Walter (Cullen Wheeler) appears, an imposing man in his mid-50s sporting an expensive camel’s-hair coat and an air of superiority.  Victor, in his policeman’s uniform, is surprised and flustered.  He had left messages with Walter’s nurse all week saying that the property had to be vacated but his calls were never returned.  

In the second act, resentments and anger, long buried, are hurled back and forth until they are nothing more than tedious to me. I am sick of both men.  Walter hits the mark when he sums it up with another Miller theme, people’s need for illusion.

“We invent ourselves, Vic, to wipe out what we know.  You invent a life of self-sacrifice, life of duty; but what never existed here cannot be upheld.  You were not upholding something, you were denying what you knew they (their parents) were.  And destroying yourself.and that’s all that is standing between us now, an illusion, Vic.”

This relationship is far more engaging in Death of a Salesman in which Willy, the washed-up younger brother, worships the memory of his older brother, Ben, who walked into the jungle in Africa when he was 17 “and when I was 21 I walked out.  And by God I was rich.”  He appears to Willy as his mind becomes increasingly unstable, always the figure to be looked up to.  

In Salesman my heart goes out Willy, as exasperating as he is, at the end but in The Price I’m always just happy to see the two-and-a-half-hour play end.  Miller leaves it up to us which brother, if either, deserves our compassion.  Perhaps though, through the characters’ names, he’s letting us know who he thinks is the victor.  

The last laugh goes to Solomon as he sits alone in the room playing the Laughing Record, heartily adding his own. 

All of the performances were strong.  A lot of seats were empty at yesterday’s matinee but the audience members there were enthusiastic, giving a standing ovation, something that is almost automatic on Broadway but not so much Off-Broadway.