A REVIEW OF ARTHUR MILLER’S THE PRICE
PRODUCED BY THE VILLAGE THEATER GROUP
THEATRE AT ST. CLEMENT’S
423 W 46th Street, New York, NY 10036
MARCH 1, 2025
Each time I see an Arthur Miller production I always forget how effectively he creates a thick atmosphere of regret and fear. He uses only the gradual revelation of tidbits of the past and the decreasing hesitancy of characters to address the THING that compels them in the present. At a minimum, actors who step into Miller’s world need only eradicate their own personal need “to be interesting” and trust the safety of Arthur Miller’s very secure structure of plot and clashing character needs. To me, from Salesman to The Crucible, his plays can flip to a test of patience only when the actors gild the lily with unrequired bombast and that all-too prevalent need so many modern actors have to prove they’re earning their paycheck by subjugating every gorgeous word to a personal onstage therapy session. Ugh.
So how did The Village Group’s inaugural Off Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “The Price” fare?
I’m going to be honest: it was Friday night after a long workweek. I’d passed the poster of The Price several times, but nothing says A FUN FRIDAY NIGHT like a sobering Arthur Miller play. ;-) I’d intended to see Operation Mincemeat, or Gypsy, or rewatch Oh, Mary! with Betty Gilpin, but I was drawn into the box office at the Theatre at St Clement’s. Why? The Price was an Arthur Miller piece I’d never seen live, nor had I ever read. Almost no one produces this play, and acting classes invariably favor View from the Bridge and The Crucible over The Price. Yet here in Hell’s Kitchen this small brave company was taking a chance on leasing a pricey stage for a little known piece.
By the end of Act I, I was completely bewildered by this question: “Why the heck isn’t The Price produced more?” Its four characters are compelling, and there’s a palpable suspense from the beginning to the end that, on a turn of dime and the slight dusting off of long held beliefs, the future could be golden with hope. At the start of Act II, I was even compelled to move from my fifth-row seat to the very back row in order to more fully absorb the entire emotional and physical scope of The Price.
There’s a lot to absorb. Most obvious, of course, is the rich and evocative furniture strewn across St. Clement’s vast stage. We’re in the attic of a brownstone that is due for the wrecking ball the next day. The set provides a powerful atmosphere that easily merges the past with the present, desired or otherwise. Each piece has meaning – and some have multiple meanings that dig the knife deep into our characters’ hearts.
On another level, without spoiling the revelations that compel our characters both overtly and subtextually, Miller’s plot is designed to keep the audience ping-ponging our allegiances from him to her, then him, then him, back to her, then him, etc. You sign up to play this game with every Arthur Miller play, and in The Price the game is as enjoyable and heart-breaking as ever. For some who may relate all too much to what the characters are pushing for, the game may be torturous...particularly if you’ve entered your final or penultimate stage of life. For me, the closer each character identified their prerequisite for feeling they haven’t wasted their life, the more I felt they were identifying mine. That’s not easy to absorb, yet it’s exactly why I attend theater. It’s exactly why I write for theater.
On another more feel-good level, each character was purrrrfectly cast. During the intermission, from the auditorium to the lobby to the restroom, I could hear the audience buzzing about how excellent each actor was.
Bill Barry carried the burden of the show’s central task: selling his parent’s dusty possessions. His task, we eventually learn, could aid the construction, restoration, or destruction of the feelings of usefulness, hope, and a life-well-lived for his wife, his brother, and an elderly appraiser. That is an oversimplified summary, of course, what cannot be simplified is the complexity of Mr. Barry’s performance. Martyr? Victim? Perpetrator? Truth-teller? Fantasist? A lesser actor would have chosen one of these labels and sledge-hammered the audience with it. What was so absorbing about Barry’s performance was, like the best actors, no moment cancelled the other possibilities out. That shifting eruptive complexity requires an extraordinary and fearless actor like Bill Barry.
Cullen Wheeler entered the stage initially with that sexy assuredness of a man fully aware of his own self-made success. Cullen’s salient job in The Price was to deconstruct this well-cemented veneer and fight to show his brother that he has changed for the better. Did he win the fight? I won’t tell you. But what I utterly respected about Wheeler’s performance is this: his character’s default demeanor of resolve and competence battled his brother’s DNA of victimization and hostility like a battering ram. Had Cullen presented himself any less formidably, the tension would have been lessened. Also, his 2nd Act monologue was a MESMERIZING tour-de-force. You really don’t want to miss it.
Mike Durkin played the nearly 90-year-old appraiser named Solomon who, in the first act, functionally aids in exposition. In the second act, he is mostly forced into the back bedroom to give space for the central fraternal drama to play out. And yet, emotionally, he felt like the heart and soul of this play. How love can be expressed to a stranger. How a father who cares could be. What a life built on caring for others, adaptability, and ageless renewal can look like. Mr. Durkin supplemented the quirky, down-to-earth dialogue of Miller’s character with wisdom – albeit biased wisdom. Here’s the glorious part of Mike’s performance: although it’s not outrightly written in the script, Mike infiltrated this dusty attic with love, even though almost no character appreciated it. I lost my father when I was 19, so Mike’s presence on stage felt like a comforting sequoia tree planted in a tumble of urban neurosis. I was quietly saying to myself, “He’s the answer and he’s right there! Lean on him! Lean on him!” I feel like I’ll still need more days to understand what Miller needed us to understand about Solomon, but in the moment Mike Durkin’s portrayal brought me to tears.
Lastly, but absolutely not least: Janelle Farias Sando’s portrayal of Esther Franz mesmerized me the most because a) her character is driven by the most compelling need to me, not just of this play but of ANY Arthur Miller play, and b) Janelle’s ability to tackle this complex role is extraordinary. Briefly, Esther Franz wants her husband to want more. On a cerebral level, she understands all the circumstantial reasons she and her husband experience only the drip drip drip of life’s faucet. On a cerebral level, she knows how to steer her husband clear from the dread of feeling like he’s wasted his life. But from her new suit to her insistence that the contents of the attic should be sold at a higher price, she obviously can no longer sublimate what she wants. But that’s all in the writing. What Janelle brings to the character is far more enrapturing. Janelle raises the stakes by supplementing the script’s givens with a gorgeous articulation and a powerful use of mixed head and chest registers that presents this woman as the most intelligent, competent, and powerful person in the room. We feel that, not only should she want more from life, she DESERVES more. If we feel that from a distance of forty feet, her husband must feel it like constant stern twist to the nipples every five seconds. When her brother-in-law entered the attic, the way Janelle’s body language and demeanor perked up immediately raised the stakes. I delighted in the game that was established in the 2nd Act: how can Esther sway her husband to follow his brother’s lead without revealing that she IS his brother in competence, values, priorities, and ferocity in almost every way? Janelle was up for this game of forbearance and fierceness from opening to the bow. I very much appreciated what I suspect to be the truth: that an actress who knows how to live life fully best knows how to make us feel what it’s like to live only half a life. Janelle absolutely made us feel it.
I marveled at details both small and large of this ship called The Price, knowing full well the captain’s name is director Noelle McGrath. Never has a single inanimate object such as a chair, placed downstage center, transformed from hero to villain and then to mythic status right before my eyes. Ultimately this is a small off-Broadway production of a lesser-known Arthur Miller play, and yet from casting to direction, The Village Group’s production of The Price obviously draws from a pool of talent that only New York City can feed. This is a great production composed of great talent, and produced with incredible attention to detail by Daniel Condon and Andrew Beregovoy. The Village Theatre Group should make every New Yorker proud to live just down the street such a singular, extraordinary production.
Go see The Price at any price.
Yours,
Daniel Tobias
Much Ado About Nothing REVIEW
This afternoon I streamed Josie Rourke's "Much Ado About Nothing" (link below) because of its cast and energetic 2011 interpretation - and because I was totally procrastinating doing my laundry. Well, this is a luxury a quarantine affords an artist.
Josie Rourke's direction is inspired and inventive, provided you are open to modernized settings for Shakespeare and are willing to fan away the wafts of Mama Mia's Greek olive-oil drenched feta cheese. Oh...and by "modernization" I mean the puffy-shouldered 1980's alternating with 80's mod-revival: beat-boxes, fog machines, sunglasses, and so forth. I think she won me over by the end of the first act. Certainly our two headliners did. Benedict has always been a showy role that risks camping it up to the audience vs. monologuing to the gods. Both are called for in Much Ado, and both require a panache that relies as much on the actor's magnetism as the lines themselves. David Tennant, no one should be surprised, gets that balance right. As Beatrice, Catherine Tate is so monumentally talented that it's easy to drift into some alternate reality in which Shakespeare created the role of Beatrice specifically for Catherine. She's that good. After watching this I YouTubed the hell out of Catherine Tate and concluded she is inordinately excellent at every role she steps her feet into. Some actresses, like Judy Dench, like Catherine Tate, are just smiled on by heaven.
And that's the good stuff. Now let's switch to the fun stuff...
As always, during any and every Shakespeare production, my brain inevitably starts to segregate the actors who bring their own truth and instincts to their roles (at least a little). You know...the ones on stage who seem to be discovering moments in front of our eyes, absent of anticipation and telescoping. And then, way down at a more prominent lower level, wade those actors who seem to retreat to the safety of rather cartoonish recitations: the way-too exaggerated sarcasm, the unconvincing coyness, the all-too-deliberate look of interest that would be employed equally to news of the Holocaust and hearing a new recipe for lemon merengue pie. I think we all recognize that familiar feeling of impatience when actors of lesser competence open their mouths, for we're always miles ahead of their words - which are infused with no surprises. We secretly assume the exact same delivery was presented at very the first table read, right? And surprises, above all else, to me, keep Shakespeare percolating. This production of "Much Ado About Nothing" has its share of these lesser actors. Fortunately, this production disguises them with...um...sexiness - which is a marvelously appealing smoke screen. And, fortunately, the good in this production far outweighs the things that made me impatient.
The singular scene that riveted me the most was the one in which Beatrice and Benedick confess their love for each other and then plot to avenge. Watch Catherine Tate bounce like a pinball off the impacts of changing circumstances, words, and stakes. After all, this is the scene that travels from "I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest," to "Kill Claudio," all the while peppered with witty one-liners, a dash of slapstick, and, thanks to Catherine's instincts, a well-timed clearing of the throat that seemed to synthesize every ounce of Beatrice's conflict. Catherine's emotions seem so entirely spontaneous and fresh. I rewatched it four times in a row just for the pleasure of watching how, to me, Shakespeare should always be performed.
How do you feel about this production? How do you feel about the choice to bring it to the 1980's? How do you feel about acting in Shakespeare plays?
Daniel Tobias
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwy2a6ScZ-c&fbclid=IwAR1YWym9nPmvfmMH7idOn7GdrotBFtYKfE6bRPQ85xEtX8bbf-UBMlWY88w
He Wanted A License Plate with a Confederate Flag...
Recently a friend visited me in New York City. He’s from the South. What draws us together as close friends is that we both agree critical thinking should take precedent over emotionalism when discussing ideas. After dinner he mentioned he wanted to buy a license plate with a Confederate Flag in order to support state rights over Federal rights. I told him, "In no way would I ever get into a car with a Confederate Flag." He argued modern liberalism has rewritten history so that the Confederate Flag now represents racism rather than its original political symbol of States Rights over Federal Rights. As I started to counter that theory, I realized I'd never actually researched the Confederate Flag. I could not respond with any authority. I could only be emotional and assumptive – always the most annoying kind of argument. I had work to do. Without getting a wink of sleep, I spent midnight to sunrise researching. My goal was to jostle my friend awake for breakfast, armed with information.
When the sun came up, I was armed. I had page after page of notes detailing the history of the Confederate Flag. How there were several iterations of the Confederate Flag prior to the emergence of the Southern Cross Flag that took its final form during The Civil War, mostly due to General E. Lee’s early success.
In quote after quote, every Confederate argument to enter the Civil War was overwhelmingly centered on the desire to continue slavery. I learned it was a known fact to Confederate politicians prior to 1861 that The United States of America was among the last of the civilized countries in the entire world to abolish slavery. So, with the deliberate intention to spin the desire for slavery as something less abhorrent, Confederate politicians started replacing the battle cry for slavery with the cry for States Rights over Federal Rights. But a State’s right to continue slavery was always at the heart of every argument to secede or enter a Civil War. There was never a time when it wasn’t. All other goals were just peas around the turkey.
Beginning in the 1950’s white U.S. citizens began to dilute the significance of the Confederate Flag with feelings of nostalgia: sweet tea, old traditions, church on Sundays, good old boys, some fading Southern way of life. The Confederate Flag was commercialized on beach towels, swimming suits, shirts, and the Dukes of Hazard. One reason people allowed the Confederate Flag to be commercialized was because - up until recently - the media generally excluded black politics and objections. Generations in white communities grew up without knowing the history of the flag. My brother and I, for example, grew up in California watching the Dukes of Hazard without ever knowing what that cross of stars on the General Lee represented. Nor did we know who General Lee referred to. Nobody taught us. Mostly, I think, nobody wanted to bring up the subject to kids. School text books certainly had no desire to discuss in detail America’s history of rampant racism. Particularly because the racism never went away. How do you answer a child when she raises her hand to ask why the entire country refused to permit black citizens to vote until 102 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation?
But ignorance of the past is not in and of itself a rewriting of history. It’s simply ignorance. According to my research, historians and black citizens ALWAYS associated the Southern Cross Flag with the same racism that fueled slavery, segregation, and discrimination. It NEVER represented only an enthusiasm for State Rights over Federal Rights, distinct and separate from racism. Not once. During the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Confederate Flag truly became cemented only as a symbol of hate once the KKK began to embrace it loudly and proudly. It remains a symbol of hate.
Can you hang a Confederate Flag from your porch to commemorate the fallen soldiers of the Civil War without commemorating what they died for? I don’t see how that’s possible without considerable and willful disregard of basic facts. Secession was Constitutionally illegal in 1861. The flashpoint of the Civil War sparked in April 1861 when secessionists attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina shortly after Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated as the President of the United States. The whole point of creating a Confederate Flag was to rally the rebellion of the Confederation against the laws of the United States. Because Confederate Soldiers marched in line behind this flag, they died. So to fly the flag today is to simultaneously celebrate what the fallen soldier fought for: the right to own other human beings based on skin color. In the Civil War 258,000 Confederate soldiers gave up their lives to defend their right to enslave and brutalize 45,000,000 humans merely because of the color of their skin. Of the 30,000,000 slaves brought to the United States, 2,400,000 captured Africans died in transport and were tossed overboard like spoilt potatoes. That is the Confederate Flag’s legacy. To fly the Confederate Flag from your suburban front porch in honor of fallen Confederate soldiers is to simultaneously support what they gave up their lives for. This makes sense. One cannot fly a swastika to honor dead Nazi soldiers without simultaneously supporting the systematic slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews. It’d be illogical, inconsistent, and coldly insensitive to feel otherwise.
So, when breakfast came around, I recall bombarding my friend with my research. I recall concluding HE was rewriting history by disassociating the Confederate Flag from racism, human trafficking, and slavery. I recall concluding he may believe States Rights should be prioritized over Federal Rights, and he may even have excellent reasons to, but he needs a brand new flag or symbol for that. The Confederate Flag is permanently stained with the blood and tears of the most atrocious institutionalized racism and injustice in US History. And I definitely reinforced my refusal to board a vehicle with a Confederate Flag license plate.
My friend laughed at the fact that I’d stay up all night researching a topic he had half-heartedly tossed into the discussion the night before. Although he consented not to buy such a license plate, he warned me he would commence researching his side of the argument before he let it go. So, the only argument I really won is one we already agreed on: being informed is far more important than merely being passionate or indignant. And becoming informed always takes effort, focus, and time.
I watched two videos released by #ColdCrashPictures. Whatever I learned that one night pales by comparison to the research this man conducted over four months on this same subject. I encourage you to watch Part 1 and Part 2 of “Should We Still Be Watching ‘Gone with the Wind?’" It’s entertaining while being very, very well researched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fukTk8gJ3M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDkwGQFLcjE
SHE SAID THEY TALK IN A MINOR KEY
For all you members of the Language Accuracy Police:
Over the years I've heard voice and speech teachers claim certain accents are in minor keys, while others are in major keys. I've even heard some state that effective speakers speak in major keys, and ineffective speakers speak in minor keys. Then they provide examples, and I have to politely bite my tongue. What they're usually trying to say is that certain accents include more melismas (one syllable that slides over more than one note), or that the ending of a sentence slides up or down a semi-tone (a half note.) Neither of these indicate a minor key. Speech teachers also love to claim a Valley Girl Accent is in minor key. Or that whining is in a minor key. They're not. Musicians know it's the ORDER of the semi-tones and whole-steps that indicate if something is in a major or minor key, not merely the inclusion of semi-tones.
What I HAVE noticed is that most accents tend to start on the fifth note of a scale (the Solfege SO), and then vacillate on the MI, FA, SO for a bit before descending down to the DO. That hovering around MI, FA, SO when isolated may give the impression of a minor key, but most sentences descend downwards until they end with an accent on a DO - and THAT prescribes the key. It's almost always a MAJOR key. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to find any accent that truly is in a minor key - meaning it ends with an accent on LA rather than DO.
Let's break down the attached video, referring to minute 4:01. Joan Washington says one of the most interesting factors in accents is whether or not an accent's tune is in a "major" or "minor" key. To illustrate a minor key, she imitates a Birmingham accent. To musicians, Joan absolutely does this accent in a Major Key (her notes are more or less completely Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So), and she ends the key on TI leading to the DO, which is just another indication she is definitely in a Major Key.
I think what Joan is really trying to say is that certain accents include more melismas (sliding of one syllable over several notes) over others. We know speech teachers discourage half-tone melismas in general, let alone at the end of sentences. Joan Washington would be more accurate to suggest the Birminham accent is more chromatic than other accents, or includes more melismas, or possibly is colored by the Octatonic Scale. But to label it a minor key is simply inaccurate to musicians.
I've broken down her sentence by Solfege, and you'll see this sentence was "sung" in a major key, and that she mistook the inclusions of semi-tones in her tune for a Minor key:
Bir (fa)
min ham which is abso (so)
lu (fa)
tly in minor key (so)
so I can go (fa)
on (so)
and (fa)
on and end (mi)
where I (so)
like (fa)
but (so)
never ever (la)
end (so)
on a (fa)
definte (mi)
no- (ti)
ote (do).
It all started when…
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