Theater Review—

Long Wharf Has Given ‘The Price’ The Treatment It Deserves

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — Arthur Miller is unarguably one of the greatest playwrights in American history.

The Price, his drama of family dynamics and class conflicts which premiered on Broadway in 1967, is one of his most enduring works. Now, in a tribute to Miller who died in 2005, Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein has given it the kind of production it deserves.

In Long Wharf tradition, Eugene Lee’s stunning set design is an antique store run amok: a stage piled up with the furniture and worldly goods of a millionaire who went bust in the Great Depression. The set is a jumble of furniture, lamps, musical instruments, college and boyhood memorabilia, and a wardrobe filled with shimmering evening clothes. What doesn’t fit on the floor, hangs from the rafters.

Ostensibly, the title refers to an offer that is to be made by a dealer. The building is to be torn down for Urban Renewal, and after moldering in the attic for more than thirty years, the stuff has to go. As the play opens, Victor Franz, one of the  former millionaire’s two sons, waits with his wife for a junk dealer to come and appraise the entire lot. They are poor people, Victor and Esther. He is a New York City policeman, nearing retirement, and they need the money.

Victor, who lives by a rigid code of honor and duty, does not want to bargain over the things being sold. He just wants the man to give him a price. However, Gregory Solomon, who Arthur Miller declared was one of his favorite characters, refuses to cooperate.

An 89-year-old immigrant from Tsarist Lithuania, Solomon has been lured out of retirement by Victor’s phone call (“You must have gotten my name out of a very old phone book”) and is not about to give up the pleasures of extended negotiation.

As he darts about the room, examining individual pieces and asking questions, Victor allows the real story of the Franz family to unfold. When his father’s business failed overnight, plunging their parents into sudden and unexpected poverty, Victor and his older brother chose radically divergent paths. Victor dropped out of college, where he had been a promising science student, to support his newly widowed father. Opting for the Civil Service as a sinecure, he joined the police force, promising his wife that it would only be temporary.

His brother, Walter, vowed to pursue his own education at all costs. Refusing to help the family, he  became a highly successful surgeon, while Victor stayed a cop. The two brothers have not seen each other in 17 years, since their father’s funeral.

Now Walter appears unexpectedly, to oversee the disposal of the goods. With his sharply razored haircut and sleek camel’s hair coat, Walter has no interest in the money. He just wants to use the occasion to reconnect with his brother and, under Solomon’s probing, clarify some of the issues that have kept them apart all this time.

Just as each individual item in the attic — from their mother’s harp and Victor’s fencing foil to a 1920s Gallagher and Sheehan record — acts as a trigger to recall anecdotes from their past, so each of the brothers clings to fragments of memory to comprise a story that they feel comfortable with. “We invent ourselves to wipe out what we know,” Walter says.

Steeled by the stubborn sense of his own righteousness, Victor’s self respect is tied to the story of his own personal sacrifice in the face of his brother’s selfishness. Walter counters with his own version of events, arguing that Victor allowed himself to be manipulated by their father, who still had enough money stashed away to allow Victor to finish school, but whose paranoid fear of further poverty led him to keep that secret from his son. He argues that Victor was trapped by his own myth of family love, in a family where wealth and success had always been far more important than love.           Now, to show his good faith, Walter makes a generous offer to help his brother pick up the old thread of his lost scientific promise. Retire from the police force! He will give him money to study, a good job with the new research hospital…

But you cannot simply set a price on the life you have lived, and the decisions you made along the way. “The job of the artist is to remind people what they have chosen to forget,” Miller says. Walter cannot simply buy his way out of what he allowed, for whatever reason, to happen to his brother.

Despite the realism of the set and the down to earth details, Miller’s play resonates with both Greek and Biblical echoes. The divergence of character and the struggle between brothers for their father’s approval is straight out of the Old Testament, with Solomon as a kind of wise man, and also a moral chorus.

Throughout the play Esther has lamented her husband’s lack of ambition, their shortage of money, and his unwillingness to be more like his brother. Only at the end does realization begin to dawn, as she sees, for the first time, what is genuinely good about his character, however misguided and tentative he may have been.

Definitely the star of this production is David Margulies, in the role of Solomon, bringing to the play an element of wry humor that I’ve never seen in any other Miller play. He is well matched by Marco Barricelli as Victor, and Jeff McCarthy as Walter.

Kate Forbes comes across as annoying for the first three-quarters of the play, continually nagging her husband, and lamenting the fact that he is only a policeman when she had imagined she was marrying into a good family.  But one of Miller’s great talents is his ability to endow even inarticulate characters with the ability to affect each other with their words.

To borrow from Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid!” and happily- because this play is not a tragedy. Esther finally gets it.

(Performances continue for just a few more nights, with the final curtain dropping on November 18.

Call 787-4282 or visit LongWharf.org for performance and ticket details.)