THEATER REVIEW: THE PRICE

 

Marvin Kaplin and Diane Travis play The Price right. 

The Price is right (on).

By Ed Rampell

At a Paul Winter concert (I think) one summer in the 1980s I somehow found myself backstage at Carnegie Hall beside a very tall man. I looked up and was shocked to see who stood next to me: Arthur Miller. “God bless you, Mr. Miller!” I blurted out to the American Shakespeare, much to the amusement of Miller. I proceeded to have a conversation with the socially conscious playwright of Death of a Salesman about nuclear free Palau, where I was then living in Micronesia.

So it was with great expectations that along with Jacob Kamhis, co-writer of the new play Air Force Man, I attended the premiere of Miller’s The Price at L.A.’s Theatre West, and I was not disappointed. If rats are a leitmotif of George Orwell’s books, running from Down and Out in London and Paris to Homage to Catalonia all the way through Big Brother’s torture of Winston Smith in 1984’s dreaded “Room 101," tthen the flopped businessman is Miller’s recurring nightmare of the American Dream gone wrong.

Unlike Miller’s immortal Willy Loman, the failed wheeler-dealer in The Price is never seen on stage, yet his presence is felt everywhere.  He is the deceased father of brothers now in their sixties, NYPD officer Victor Franz (Cal Bartlett) and Walter Franz (Don Moss), a surgeon. Although the patriarch is long dead the long arm of the law of the persistence of memory still haunts his sons who grapple -– literally and figuratively –- with their old man’s legacy, as they meet in an attic to dispose of family heirlooms and belongings. An 89-year-old appraiser (a droll Marvin Kaplan as Gregory Solomon) and Dianne Travis as Victor’s wife Esther also complete the scene.

This confrontation between the brothers has been simmering since the Great Depression, and is a sort of High Noon without the gun play (despite that fact that Vic, as one of NYPD’s blues, is indeed packing heat). It’s a sign of the Miller's prowess that playwright's able to generate emotional intensity crackling with tension without resorting to violence as many screenwriters often do, substituting mindless action for thoughtful probing of the human condition in order to ratchet up viewers’ passions. But even more than that, Miller uses the family drama as a microcosm of capitalism, and how it affects ordinary people ensnared by it and market mentality.

The 1929 stock market crash sets the wheels in motion for this Tony Award-winning drama that debuted on Broadway almost 40 years later. The Depression wipes the Franz’s paterfamilias and his business out (or does it?). Vic, who has a promising career as a scientist before him, abandons his dreams (and hope) to support his broken old man as a cop (the security of civil service, don’tchaknow?), while Walter apparently goes his merry way to attain fame, fortune and status as the man of science Vic could have also been. Esther is Vic’s long-suffering wife, driven to drink by her yearning for the good life and respectability that only money could buy (or can it?). As the appraiser, Solomon puts a dollar value on the accumulated possessions in the old family attic, where Vic and his father had sought refuge from the ravages of the Depression (losing the rest of what had been their home), as the house faces demolition in New York’s never ending cavalcade of urban renewal.

But the analytical bard is not content with just exploring how the collapse of capitalism affects individuals, but how its underlying ideology poisons them and their relations with one another, rendering them into being what Herbert Marcuse called “one dimensional men” (and women). Willy Loman and the Franz’s father may be fiscal fiascos, but Walter’s eminence and  “success” has also taken their toll on him, and his relationship with his family. What price making it? Like Miller’s Salesman masterpiece, and his war profiteering drama All My Sons, The Price is a scathing critique of the capitalist system, which places a price tag on everything and everyone.

Amidst the bric-a-brac for sale is the harp their long dead mother once strummed, before surrendering her dreams of la vie artistique in order to be taken care, by any means, as the wife of a man of means. Miller captured and expressed the hippie critique of materialism and nine-to-five drudgery then in vogue when The Price premiered in 1967. However, considering today’s crises and free fall of the free market economy, The Price has a renewed relevancy for today’s audiences.

Of course, Miller is a dramatist, not a pamphleteer, and it’s this playwright’s enduring genius that he presents all of the above in a highly entertaining way, deftly directed by Stu Berg with skilled ensemble acting by an able cast. But by placing the angst of his dramatis personae firmly within the context of capitalism, Miller clearly illumines the long day’s journey into night of the Franz family. (By the way, not enough emphasis is placed on Eugene O’Neill’s connections to the Left, from John Reed and Louise Bryant to the Group Theatre and the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project. They clearly impacted on his thinking, as his characters, too, often act out of an economic imperative that influenced their tormented psyches.)

Although the ancient appraiser sometimes personifies capitalism, other times Kaplan displays an all-knowing wisdom of Solomon, as he coolly, analytically appraises the situation (even as he hustles to make a buck and to revive his once thriving livelihood and raison d’etre). Solomon also provides the comic relief in what might otherwise have been an overheated family drama, as  Kaplan wittily steals most scenes he’s in.
  

The Price runs through March 21 at Theatre West, 333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, L.A., CA 90068.  For more info: 323/851-7977; www.theatrewest.org.