Highest 'Price'

Aurora Theatre taps into the ever-relevant genius of Arthur Miller.
By Robert Avila

'A SYSTEM BROKE down here!" Vic (Charles Dean) says. "Did I imagine that?" The 50-year-old beat cop is referring back to his young adulthood and the catastrophic social collapse called the Great Depression, a formative influence not only on him but an entire generation that included the late playwright Arthur Miller.

As the wreckage in New Orleans and the South becomes only the most visible sign of a profound and endemic pattern of social neglect by a system of runaway greed, Miller's small but tightly wound family drama – brought vividly and unforgettably to life by a veritable dream-cast in director Joy Carlin's production – spins like a miniature tornado, across today's headlines. How many today have, like Vic, permanently lost faith in the so-called "system"? (Of course, Vic is a son of a once-rich man decimated by the stock market crash of 1929, so his sense of betrayal is colored the way any mortal reminder tends to blindside the privileged. The better question may be how many of the disproportionately poor and black people victimized twice over by elements, elected and otherwise, still had any illusions left about "the system" as Katrina came ashore?)

In the above-referenced scene and throughout this tense, often very funny, deeply engaging two-act drama, Vic wants to justify his decision to stick by his helpless father in bewildering newfound penury, rather than pursue his talents in the sciences and thereby move ahead, whatever the cost to his family, like his long-estranged brother, Walt (Michael Santo), a highly successful surgeon. His justification is, then, also an accusation, leveled squarely at Walt but indirectly too at his unhappy wife, Esther (Judith Marx), who faces middle age with a withering sense of a life unfulfilled. More generally it aims at a ruthless social jungle.

But Miller's complex accounting of the dynamics in the room prevents any easy laying on of blame; the high ground here is, after all, a condemned attic, crammed ceiling-high with old family furniture that all have some claim to – including Gregory Solomon (Ray Reinhardt), the arch and incredibly vital old Jewish furniture dealer who has come out of retirement lured by the promise of another lucrative transaction and even now in the midst of his canny appraisal. In short, it soon becomes clear that ex-fencer Vic's moral sallies perform a self-serving function too, defending a more complicated and vulnerable anatomy of regret. Meanwhile, Walt's success has cost him his own family, fractured beyond repair by divorce and emotional detachment, but we also see his ambition in a different light with his own version of the past and his revelations about their father.

The Price opens a five-play season dedicated to the memory of Miller, and it's no exaggeration to say a playwright could hardly receive a better tribute than a production like the one Aurora rolls out. Small theater like this, capable of delivering Miller's particular poetry of the everyday with such apt intimacy, detail, and striking force just makes you feel sorry for the big guys. The set, another superb design from Richard Olmsted, is Antique Road Show heaven: cozy and mysterious, full of the powerful, curious, and covetous attraction of past lives, with their former intimacies and lost promises, all warmly and eerily alive like air still churning with recent laughter or tears.

In fact, hollow yet contagious laughter from the past does come with the room, in an old novelty record Vic puts on the phonograph at the outset of the play, and that Mr. Solomon plays again at the end. The record's canned laughter calls forth the real thing, echoing the real laughter of bygone days. But by the second time, the reanimating power of that classic album (a sort of historical record, you might say) seems less an echo than a visitation. As Solomon sits helplessly yet triumphantly in his chair, Miller closes the play quite brilliantly with a powerfully atavistic moment, a reincarnation of the unspeakable and the unspoken, as mounting laughter widens into subtler shades of absurd, cruel, insane meaning, all unraveling in a giddy loss of control.

Miller's own boyhood memory of the collective trauma of the 1930s, and his attempt to grasp, both intellectually and artistically its significance, seems to reverberate through all the societal failures, cataclysmic disruptions, and moral meltdowns that serve as integral backdrops to his best work. Not coincidentally, these blights – modern warfare, the military-industrial complex, genocide, McCarthyism (as transposed to historic 17th-century Salem, Mass.) – are among the towering problems of the 20th century, a decade Miller – who died, in February, at 89 – nearly spanned in its entirety. Few playwrights have dared take on with his degree of earnestness such milestones of the bloodiest century on record so far, or succeeded (when he has succeeded, which is often enough) on such homely terms. The Price, like Death of a Salesman or All My Sons, registers with great sensitivity the major fault lines of our time in the painful fissures of ordinary family life. And after all, it's more than a system failure that describes the predicament facing humankind or the characters here. A family broke too, as Vic and Walt know well enough. When even our most intimate ties feel the burden of a system built fundamentally on exploitation, that's no mere metaphor.

'The Price' runs through Oct. 9. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m., Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk. $28-$45. (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org.