The Price

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Arthur Miller has always been our major playwright of moral ambiguity, never more so than in his 1968 drama The Price, now receiving its first Off Broadway revival. The metaphoric title refers both to the value of an attic of old furniture to be sold as well as the price paid by the choices that the characters have made. The fifth New York revival and the first production by the newly formed Village Theater Group directed by Noelle McGrath is both uneven at times and weakly cast, but Miller’s ultimately powerful play still makes its point.

While Death of a Salesman was about a man with phony ideals, The Price is about a man who may have been too honest. Victor Franz, a veteran 28 year New York City policeman, needs to sell his father’s old furniture which has been sitting in the attic of the family brownstone for the last 16 years, since his father died, as the building is at last going to be torn down. He is accompanied by his wife Esther who not only resents the lower-middle-class life they have been leading but wants him to take retirement and begin a new career. Beset by materialism, she is humiliated that everyone they meet knows what salary Victor makes.

Although Victor has called his long estranged brother Walter, a very successful surgeon who he has not seen in 16 years, three times that week with no results, it appears he will have to go ahead on his own with the sale to Gregory Solomon, an elderly Russian Jewish furniture dealer whose name he found in an old phone directory. While Esther insists that the furniture mostly purchased by the 1920’s or before is worth a fortune, Victor is willing to accept Solomon’s appraisal that such massive solid wood is in no great demand for the tiny apartments of 1968 and the love of built in obsolescence so that you can refurnish periodically. And then brother Walter walks in.

Polished, wealthy and sophisticated, Walter pretends not to know why Victor resents him, though obviously they had words when their father died 16 years ago. Finally it comes out: after the crash when their mother had died and their father lost all his money, Victor needed $500 to continue his college education in science and Walter, who was already working as a doctor, had turned him down. As a result, Victor had had to drop out of college and join the police force, giving up his dream of ever doing research in science. He also continued to support their father while the wildly successful Walter only contributed five dollars a month. But now Walter is given a chance to tell his side of the story and it is not what either Victor or we are expecting. As they say, there are always two sides to every story.

McGrath’s staging hits certain markers, misses others. The furniture dealer Gregory Solomon, the funniest and most Jewish character in the Miller canon, is at times a stand-in for the absent father. In many earlier productions with the two brothers debating across Solomon seated center stage in the arm chair, one saw the father about whom they were arguing. This McGrath’s direction fails to do. However, the white-bearded Mike Durkin as the wily octogenarian who has an anecdote and an aphorism for every occasion is still the most winning performance in the play. He captures every nuance and inflection of Solomon’s old-world humor.

While the first act (caused by the unnecessary intermission) plays rather slowly, the second half of the play when the two brothers duke it out picks up the pace and makes up for it. In the second best written role in the play, Cullen Wheeler is suave, urbane and cultured. Played by Wheeler as cool as ice, his character’s revelations burn with an intense passion.

The other two characters have always been more problematic even when played by major stage and screen stars. Bill Barry seems rather miscast as the New York City policeman, both physically too slight for the job and too refined for the day to day coarseness of the work. At times he seems undermined and diminished by Walter even when he has the moral upper hand. In the weakest role, Janelle Farias Sando as the complaining Esther is both petulant and whiny, even when she is correct in her observations, but from the play’s first production in 1968 this has been a problem.

The elaborate setting credited to the Village Theater Group is a worthy fifth character in the story with its many end tables, chairs, bureaus, clocks, radios, paintings, screens, etc. Among the props that play a part of the story line and represent the family life before the crash are a fencing foil, an oar, white embroidered fencing gloves, a gramophone, and the ubiquitous harp once played by their mother, all courtesy of BB Props. While the men’s suits are redolent of the period, Esther’s red outfit and wig by Bridget McJohn do not fit the character. Isaac Winston’s subtle lighting design is fine as far as it goes but at times seems a little too inconspicuous.

While The Village Theater Group’s revival of the oft seen The Price does not do full justice to the play, it ultimately still has has a powerful impact as a play that asks moral questions in an era when lying and corruption seem to be the tenor of the day. With several memorable performances and several less so, the play remains one of Arthur Miller’s masterpieces but proves more and more difficult to bring off with each succeeding revival. At 15 minutes under three hours, the play seems a bit long and could lose the unnecessary but optional intermission (the original production did not have one), but will probably speed up with more playing time.

The Price (through March 30, 2025)

The Village Theater Group

Theatre at St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.ci.ovationtix.com/36897 or http://www.ThePriceOffBway.com

Running time: two hours and 45 minutes including one intermission