'The Price' at Roundabout Theatre: Fierce Arthur Miller, turned to prose by a disappointing production
"The past, for Arthur Miller, is not merely the collection of events that alter a subsequent collections of events — the easy causality of chronology — but the way his characters remember, how they interpret those past events: memory, with its entourage of regret and nostalgia and denial, and with its vivid and inevitable social context, is his great subject."
I recently wrote that paragraph in a commentary on Arthur Miller as an introduction to his play The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, but it proves useful for this review of the new Broadway production of The Price, directed disappointingly and prosaically by Terry Kinney.
Filled with quotable lines and a fierce indictment of modern values, the 1968 drama takes place in a New York brownstone that's about to be torn down. Empty for 16 years, the place is stuffed to the brim with the furniture and memorabilia of the Franz family. Derek McLane's set is oddly expressionistic, with furniture hanging high above the stage, and water towers and sunsets visible through the walls.
The contents have to be sold, so Victor Franz (Mark Ruffalo) calls a used furniture dealer, a fantastic character named Gregory Solomon (Danny DeVito), to buy the lot. Victor's wife, Esther (Jessica Hecht) is eager to make some money from this sale, sick as she is of scraping by on her husband's salary as a policeman.
Into the negotiation walks Walter Franz (Tony Shalhoub), Victor's estranged brother and also a rich surgeon. Thus begins the brother-against-brother confrontation that roils so much of American drama. Memories of their father, who was wrecked by the crash of 1929, are hurled up and back; people believe what they need to believe to make their lives bearable.
Mark Ruffalo starts out woodenly but warms up in the second act to create a sympathetic and interesting Victor. But Tony Shalhoub has adopted head tones that make his pompous Walter unconvincing and actorish rather than human.
Danny DeVito's Solomon threatens to steal the show, and his hard-boiled egg-eating scene is, indeed, a wonder, but although it's very funny, it seems funny in the wrong way — slapstick rather than Beckettian. The play is framed, start and finish, by an old laughing record — here unfortunately so authentic and scratchy that we aren't infected with uncontrollable laughter as we should be and as Solomon is. That meaningless laughter should suggest worlds of meaning about the absurdity of life.
The Price. Through May 7 at the Roundabout Theatre Company at American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street.
