February 8, 1968

Get this from a library! The price: a play. Arthur Miller - The confrontation between two brothers, brought together after many years by the need to dispose of their parent's property, leads to a re-examination and re-evaluation of attitudes. In Arthur Miller's 1968 play, The Price, the characters are two bereft sons, Walter (a surgeon) and Victor (a police officer), who are selling their late father's furniture to one Solomon, who is a.

By CLIVE BARNES

Generally speaking, the reaction of a first-night audience to a Broadway play is as predictable as a wedding service-it always says 'I do'-and therefore is irrelevant to report. Yet at the Morosco Theater last night the cheers for Arthur Miller's new play 'The Price' seemed more than an idle tribute. Behind them was the sincerity of an audience that had been deeply moved.

At is own level of psychological problem drama it is indeed afar better than average example of the genre. It is a play that will give a great deal of pleasure to many people and deserves a long and profitable run. But regrettably-or so it seems to me-the author of 'Death of a Salesman' is still waiting in the wings, unfulfilled.

Arthur Miller The Price Summary Pdf

'The Price' of the title is the legacy of the past. As with Ibsen, the classic playwright whom Mr. Miller has most in common, the past is dotted with choices, and the results of these choices govern the present. 'You have to make decisions,' as one of the characters says here, 'and you never know what's what until it's too late.' Miller's plays so often have characters poised painfully, if metaphorically, between a plaintive 'Ah but!' and a poignant 'If only then!'

'The Price' is one of the most engrossing and entertaining plays that Miller has ever written. It is superbly, even flamboyantly, theatrical, running without an intermission, complying with the classic unities of time, place and action, and Miller holds the interest with the skill of a born story-teller. But, of course, the story itself is over.

It is typical of Miller's approach here that nothing does, and nothing possibly could, happen in 'The Price.' The action has ended before the play starts, and we the audience have been brought here to listen to the explanations, to comprehend how these men by the choices of their youth have come to be what they are.

The play takes place in the attic of a once prosperous Manhattan brownstone, soon to be pulled down in the cause of architectural progress and financial stability. The attic is piled high with good, if shabby furniture and the knick-knacks of a past age. An old radio, a console gramophone, a pile of dusty records-the junk of a lifetime is spread out, naked, as if were, in the cold table of time.

A police sergeant enters and looks round the room with a mixture of affection and concern. He strokes an old harp, he tries the Victrola, and the late afternoon stillness is broken with the scratchy tones of Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean still asking the well-honed questions of yesteryear. 'Now Mr. Gallagher, now Mr. Gallagher, will you tell me what that question really means, I just wanted to find out..' The cop stops the record. We, too, are beginning to want to find out, and we are all in for a lot of questions.

Miller goes about his business dexterously. The cop's wife enters, and deftly, in a few minutes of dialogue, the whole play is set up. The cop is a failure-a guy who didn't finish college because he chose, yes, chose, to support his father, a casualty of the Depression.

His brother, who refused to help beyond contributing five dollars a month, has gone on to become a rich and famous surgeon. The two brothers have not met for 16 years. Now the cop has asked the surgeon to come along to help dispose of their father's furniture, long mouldering in the attic.

Now Miller plays a shrewd, well-judged card. We are instinctively waiting for the monster brother, but along comes Solomon, an incredibly aged, incredibly wise antiques dealer, who has come, almost out of retirement ('You must have looked up my name in a very old telephone book'), to give a price for the furniture. From then on Solomon weaves through the play, part comic relief, part dramatic contrast, always amusing, always apt.

But at last the surgeon arrives. This is the nub of the play-now the questions have to be asked and answered, and Miller does not flinch from this. (A stranger who saw the play out of town sent me a postcard suggesting that it might be called 'Ploys in the Attic,' and there is justice in the quip.)

Of course, things are not quite what they seem. The two brothers, lunging at each other with sibling wrath, turn motives and facts upside down and inside out, as they dance a psychological quadrille for the delectation of the audience. Who was really in the wrong: the loser or the winner?

It is, as I suggest, good theater. It is not, however, very serious theater. Miller's confrontation is too rigged, too pat, We are asked to believe too much, and the characters are paper-thin. Even the motivation of the story is flimsy, and will bear little surveillance.

The details of the story are extraordinarily clumsy-we have to believe such things that a man might be expected to live on the interest of $4,000 (even in 1936 this would be modest), or that a man could not work his way through college and still support his father, or that a favorite son would not know of his father's financial depositions even after his death, or that a man's brother, a famous surgeon living in the same town, could have a nervous breakdown for three years and yet he would not even hear about it. I doubt such things.

I doubt also the language of these people, for Miller has them breathing the dust of the theater rather than the air of the streets. Phrases such as 'What's it all about!' or 'It won't be solved in a day, Esther' or 'Are we both running away from the same thing' are pure fustian. At the end I felt I had been treated to an extraordinarily diverting show, which was excellent of its kind, but a kind that is itself of less than first importance.

Swap magic 3 8 ps2 isos. The direction by Ulu Grosbard and the acting of the cast are deliberately powerful-it calls for a style of acting that hits every point home hard and it gets it.

Miller has provided four wonderfully meaty parts for his cast, and they eat them up with proper gratitude. Pat Hingle, baffled and ruffled, is fine as the cop, and the cutting edge of Arthur Kennedy's surgeon makes the perfect counterpart. Even physically these two men make a splendid contrast. As Mr. Hingle's wife, Kate Reid provides a lovely portrait of a wife, very human in her mixture of good and bad, and gets the very most out of the play's best conceived role.

Finally, walking around Boris Aronson's marvelously evoked setting, itself a tour de force, is Harold Gary as the antiques dealer, who is very funny, and even more lovable. This is one of the best and one of the best-balanced casts on Broadway.

The label of Arthur Miller is not always an easy one for a play to bear-it raises certain expectations. Go expecting to see a play and perhaps 'The Price' might disappoint you. Go expecting a great evening in the theater, and it does, I think, emphatically deliver the goods.

Arthur Miller