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The Price
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Mark Taper Forum
Through March 22
There are essential questions that any revival is obligated to answer through its staging. One is, why this play? Another is, why now? In the case of director Garry Hynes’s curiously unsatisfying resuscitation of The Price, Arthur Miller’s somewhat fusty and insular, 1968 problem play, there are few answers and even less sense that such questions are seriously being raised.
To be fair, The Price is not first-rate Miller. There is the sense that the playwright, whose most enduring, early works (Death of a Salesman, The Crucible) articulated a nascent disillusionment with a postwar world in which social values seemed increasingly out of sync with human needs, has here simply retreated into solipsistic navel-gazing. At a time when the streets outside the theater were literally running riot with antiwar protests, and when playwrights farther downtown were questioning the very rationality of language and the old coherences of plot and character, Miller was desperately clinging to the rationality of Ibsenite psychological realism and the timeless verities of the classical unities.
Which is not to say that The Price is entirely dead on arrival at the Mark Taper Forum. Because there is a discernable pulse to Hynes’s mostly sterile and pallid production. Unfortunately, those signs of life rarely coincide with Miller’s central drama about a pair of estranged, middle-aged brothers who are brought together by the belated necessity of settling their deceased father’s modest possessions, along with some overdue sibling scores.
Instead, whatever authentic pleasure emerges during the evening comes mainly courtesy of the veteran actor Alan Mandell, whose delightfully elfin turn as Gregory Solomon, the play’s 89-year-old, Jewish-Lithuanian used furniture appraiser, is the kind of endearingly indelible and show-stealing performance that almost redeems the entire enterprise.
Set in the attic of a Manhattan brownstone during the mid-1960s, the mostly expository play backfills the story of two brothers and the very different choices each made 30 years before on how to deal with a father ruined by the 1929 stock market crash and rendered seemingly incapable of caring for himself.
Victor (Sam Robards) abandoned a promising academic career in science and instead took a job as a New York cop in order to provide for the psychologically paralyzed patriarch while Walter (John Bedford Lloyd) turned his back on the family to finish medical school and go on to become a wealthy and successful surgeon. Now, 16 years after the father’s death — and as many years since the brothers last spoke — the imminent demolition of the brownstone has forced a shotgun reunion as the two men gather to sell off the neglected bric-a-brac and a literal mountain of heavy old family furniture (on Matt Saunder’s semi-literal pile of a set).
The real price being negotiated, of course, is over the legacy of the past, which, like his father before him, has immobilized Victor in a bitterness that still prevents him from fully engaging with life.
And yet, especially from the perspective of our own globalized century in which any fully pensioned and salaried employment seems a highly worthwhile if increasingly rare thing, Victor’s complaints of somehow being cheated never seem to take root.
But that may have less to do with Miller and more with the nagging sense that Robards and Lloyd demonstrate little connection with the midcentury characters that the play calls for. (Kate Burton is equally unconvincing as Victor’s grasping, dissatisfied wife.) The complaint here isn’t merely technical — that the actors haven’t bothered learning the accents, which they haven’t. It is rather that they have failed to evoke the weariness or weight of the lived lives described by the language. And without that level of truth, any Arthur Miller becomes a middling and forgettable experience.
Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., dwntn; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m.; through March 22. (213) 628-2772, Centertheatregroup.org.
