Review by Samuel L. Leiter…
Two openings this past weekend, one a premiere and the other a revival, offer interesting parallel reflections on the pains suffered on behalf of brotherly love.
The new play is Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville, about two estranged half-siblings, the older one in Idaho and the other in the Netherlands, struggling to come to terms with one another after years in which one made serious sacrifices to care for their shared mother, while the other fled abroad to become an artist. Some might think this too close to comfort to the other play, a revival of Arthur Miller’s 1968 The Price, about two New York brothers, Victor, the elder, and Walter Franz, who reunite after 16 years of mutual silence.
Like the older brother in Grangeville, Victor sacrificed himself to care for their father, who withdrew into a shell when gobsmacked by the Depression, while Walter became a successful doctor. (Interestingly, Brendan Fraser had to leave Grangeville for “unforeseen circumstances” shortly before it opened, while both Jack Warden as Victor and David Burns as Gregory Solomon were forced by illness to be replaced by Pat Hingle and Harold Gary just before the 1968 opening of The Price.)
They meet in the attic of the house in which they grew up, about to be demolished. As Victor (Bill Barry) negotiates with an aged secondhand dealer about the price for which he’ll sell the family’s extensive collection of sturdy, old-fashioned furniture and other belongings, he and Walter (Cullen Wheeler), who enters midway through the action, contemplate the price each paid for the choices they made in their youth, especially when Walter, presumably, refused to pay $500 so that Victor could finish school.
Both the jokey, garrulous, life-affirming, philosophical old man, Gregory Solomon (Mike Durkin), and Victor’s wife, Esther (Janelle Farias Sando), anxious to get a good price from him and hoping the brothers can reconcile, sometimes butt in as the brothers confront their past. Eventually, the small talk ascends into intense arguments about issues of guilt, shame, responsibility, regret, jealousy, recrimination, and forgiveness.
Despite a solid marriage to the attractive, well-groomed Esther, and a son at MIT, Victor feels like a failure for having settled for a career as a police officer—from which he’s about to retire—rather than a scientist so that he could care for his father’s well-being. Walter may be a high-priced physician, but his private life has been burdened by divorce, difficulties with his children, and a nervous breakdown, inspiring him to seek redemption from Victor for possibly having failed him when he was in need.
The brothers hash out what happened in verbose confrontations that rise and fall and rise again as new revelations, some barely plausible, keep appearing about what did and did not happen, how Walter can make up for whatever he’s guilty of, whether Victor should forgive and forget, and on and on. Miller exposes the problems at length, but leaves them unresolved, which prompted William Goldman to suggest in The Season that the play was like intercourse without an orgasm. Unlike the ending of Grangeville, these brothers may not speak again for another 16 years.
Miller’s dialogue can be emotionally simple and direct as well as rhetorically heavy, requiring high quality actors to pull it off, although not every star who’s tackled the play succeeded. The current revival, by a new company, the Village Theatre Group, is the play’s first one Off Broadway. Gutsily, it proceeds with no name actors; with one exception, the results are bland.
Bill Barry, who looks much younger than Victor’s 50, is too low-key and colorless as the disillusioned cop, coming alive only when he quarrels with his brother. Cullen Wheeler’s dullish Walter also must wait until the fraternal fires flare before he demands attention. Janelle Farias Sando as Esther, the least interesting character, is the least interesting actor, even resorting to fake smoking when she lights a cigarette. Only Mike Durkin, white-bearded, with shoulder-length white hair, as Solomon, one of the great comic characters of serious modern drama, is worth the price of admission. His presence proves that the pontifical Miller could be quite funny. Unlike early Solomons, especially Joseph Buloff and David Burns, Durkin forces Solomon’s overtly Jewish characteristics and accent, but he brings a vibrancy, charisma, and scene-stealing force to an otherwise mediocre presentation.
This production runs a bit more than two hours, with a 15-minute intermission that ignores Miller’s suggestion that its two parts be done “unbroken.” On entering, we see an impressive assortment of old furniture and vintage props—fencing foils, an antique radio, an oar, an aging harp among them—cluttering the mostly sceneryless stage at St. Clement’s. There’s little sense to the layout, however, created, according to the press representative, by the company and not the person credited in the program. Too many pieces are spread artificially across the downstage area, facing the audience, rather than suggesting an improvised layout, with things going this way and that.
McGrath often keeps her actors above, rather than below, these pieces, blocking off half their bodies; she even places them behind an old gramophone, with its flaring loudspeaker, where they become hard to see from some seats. There’s also a cushiony club chair, placed down center, requiring whoever sits in it—mainly old Solomon—to awkwardly turn upstage to speak to the others. And, to represent an offstage bedroom, the door in a chintzy unit up right opens to show a weird geometric pattern painted on its inside face.
Despite The Price’s various problems both as a play and in this performance, it’s still the work of Arthur Miller. The price you pay to experience a couple of hours in his presence is one well worth the effort.
Photos: Joe Pacifico
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 W. 46th Street, NYC
Through March 30
