Friday, Feb. 16, 1968
The Price
Like a Pharaoh's tomb, the stage is stocked with the relics of a bygone life: a clutter of armoires and grandfather clocks, quaint archaic radios and phonographs, fringed lampshades and a golden harp. A man in a policeman's uniform slowly enters the attic room and sniffs the dust of decades. He walks over to the harp and plucks at a string. It is slack, jangled and flat--an omen of the theatrical evening to come.
Arthur Miller in The Price has written a museum piece of a play to match the set. In form, substance and attitude, his newest drama is vintage 1930s. Always inclined to use the theater as a preacher's pulpit, Miller sermonizes on his favorite themes: guilt, responsibility, and the way a man's identity is forged or warped by society's image of what he is or what he should be. In structure, though not in content, the central situation--the sibling rivalry of two brothers and their relationship to their father--somewhat resembles Miller's earlier successes, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.
The father in The Price, a wealthy businessman ruined in the '29 crash, has been dead for 28 years. During the Depression, one son, Vic (Pat Hingle), elected to stay and help support the old man by joining the police force, thus sacrificing his ambitions, his college degree and a potentially promising scientific career. The other son, Walter (Arthur Kennedy), left home and became an eminent surgeon. Estranged for all that time, the two brothers have not seen or spoken to each other for 16 years. Now the cop has summoned the surgeon so that they can make a mutual disposal of their old household belongings.
Before Vic and Walter confront each other, a Jewish-dialect comedian totters onto the premises in the form of an 89-year-old furniture appraiser. Gregory Solomon, a kind of pickle-barrel philosopher, is as welcome for comic relief as he is dramatically irrelevant. As he haggles over the value of the furniture, Solomon (Harold Gary) makes wry, mocking comments about the family, marriage, his business competitors, serving as a kind of one-man Yiddish Greek chorus.
Haggling turns to fencing when the two brothers begin to run hot words through each other in recrimination over the past. "You had a responsibility here and you walked out on it," charges Vic. "There was nothing here to betray," counters Walter, revealing that their supposedly broke father had $4,000 stashed away. In effect he accuses Vic of submitting to their father's exploitation, and tacitly suggests that the desire for self-sacrifice can be equally as corrupting as the yearning for success.
The ideas are certainly challenging enough, but Miller has failed to give them enough dramatic substance, substituting instead a logjam of self-justifying tirades. The lives of Vic and Walter, and the price they paid for their choices, are merely described, not dramatized. By contrast, Willy Loman's fate had an anguishing impact because of the subtly manipulated flashbacks in Death of a Salesman, which brought key moments of his personal history to overpowering and believable life on the stage.
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