Sylvia Suffers

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Playwrights tend to burn out young, so the mere fact that Arthur Miller, 78, opened a new drama on Broadway last week, 50 years after his debut, is noteworthy. Even better, the play is good -- complex, a little mysterious, full of arresting incident, grippingly played. The bad news is that there is so little audience for serious work that its survival is, in the producer's words, "week to week." Only two new plays have had much of a run on Broadway this season, Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor and the second half of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and their attendance has been declining.

Broken Glass revisits familiar Miller terrain. The era is the Depression, the battleground is a Jewish family, the ugly rumbling offstage is the rise of Adolf Hitler. The mainspring of the play is the paralysis that Sylvia Gellburg suffers in her legs, which has no apparent physical cause. Is it a result of her sexless and bitter marriage? Is it linked to the futile assimilationism of her Jew-among-Wasps banker husband? Is it somehow tied to her Cassandra-like obsession with Hitler's assault on German Jews, a threat in which no one around her sees urgency? Or is her disability a plea for attention? Meditating on these dilemmas are Sylvia (Amy Irving), her volatile husband (Ron Rifkin) and a doctor (David Dukes), who, without training, tries to psychoanalyze her, but begins to seduce her instead.

Miller's theme, here and arguably in all his work, is that a sense of connection with other human beings, near and far, is at once our most destructive and most redemptive condition. Taking on other people's problems exacerbates one's own; ignoring them leaves one spiritually dead. The doctor theorizes that people do not get sick alone, but in twos and threes and fours -- and more. That has happened to Sylvia Gellburg and to the world collapsing around her.