The Price

Abstract

In the past decade, The Price has emerged as one of Arthur Miller’s most produced plays, not only in major venues but in small, regional theaters. Part of this is because Miller’s name on a marquee or flyer always draws an audience, and the play is easy to stage: it has only four characters and a single set. But it also is an exceptionally fine play. The complexity of its ideas offers directors and actors a wide range in interpreting characters and their relationships, despite Miller’s stage directions, which tend to be more limiting and precise in expressing his own vision of what is taking place. The play is Miller’s most thorough exploration of a theme that had been central to his work since his first drama, No Villain, which he wrote more than thirty years earlier during the spring break of his sophomore year at the University of Michigan in 1936, when he was only twenty: the tension between our obligations to others and the demand that we take responsibility for maintaining our own lives. As Yuko Kurahashi points out in her introduction, Miller emphasized that tension in his “Production Note” to theater companies about The Price in performance: “A fine balance of sympathy should be maintained in the playing of the roles of Victor and Walter. . . . The production must therefore withhold judgment in presenting both men in all their humanity and from their own viewpoints” (xv, 3). The Price also is Miller’s most personal play, depicting most explicitly his complicated feelings toward his parents and his brother. There are many reasons to study and stage The Price as a key to understanding Miller and his ideas.Throughout his career, Miller saw himself working in the tradition of Henrik Ibsen as a social critic: drama was not merely an entertaining diversion; it could be justified only by the insight it provided that encouraged social change. The moral issues Miller brings into focus in his works never are easy. His plays are not simplistic melodramas of “good guys” confronting amoral or evil “bad guys.” He is diligent in giving every position a subtle and enticing moral voice. All the characters, as different as their responses may be, are caught in the complexity of the moment and try to deal with it in ways they can justify, ways that will enable them to maintain their sense of integrity and self-respect, what Miller in “Tragedy and the Common Man” calls “dignity,” “our chosen image of what and who we are in this world” (New York Times 27 February 1949, X1). Even Judge Danforth in The Crucible is given a scene in which he justifies his actions, and the audience is invited to consider the legitimacy of his views.Many commentators have identified personal accountability as a central theme throughout Miller’s works, and certainly Miller holds people responsible for what they do: he demands that we pay attention to the consequences of our actions, attitudes, and beliefs. But it also is important to note that Miller explores responsibility by simultaneously examining its companion concept: the possibility of forgiveness. In this way, he prevents his ethical explorations from falling into vengeful and banal moralism. Recall Joe Keller’s plea for us to “see it human” in act 1 of All My Sons; Charley’s response to Biff, “Nobody dast blame this man,” in the Requiem at Willy’s grave that ends Death of a Salesman; John Proctor’s struggle to recover his sense of moral worthiness after his affair with Abigail Williams in The Crucible; or Ivo van Hove’s staging of the final scene in A View From the Bridge as a scrum of all the characters in a rain of blood in his 2014 Young Vic production, a portrait of their interlocking responsibility for events.By the time he was entering his fifties in the early 1960s, Miller had lived a morally and emotionally complicated life. He had experienced Elia Kazan’s and his own encounters with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, his divorce from Mary Slattery, a tumultuous marriage and divorce from Marilyn Monroe, her death, his renewed relationship with Kazan at Lincoln Center, and the understanding and love offered him by his third wife, Inge Morath. He became more directly focused on forgiveness in the responsibility/forgiveness interplay than he had been in the 1940s and 1950s. Forgiveness is the culminating theme in After the Fall in 1964 and is explicitly considered again in the conversation between Dr. Hyman and Phillip Gellburg near the end of Broken Glass in 1994. The Price, first performed in 1968, is a study of the interrelated dynamics of responsibility, forgiveness, dignity, and shame. The battle between the two brothers in The Price over interpretations of their family’s past is a struggle to preserve dignity in a situation where each brother realizes that the stability of his own story of who he is and what he has done may involve his brother’s acknowledgment and forgiveness. The problem is that the narrative the brothers have created is a zero-sum game: forgiveness of one brother and acknowledgment of his dignity seems to preclude preserving the dignity of the other. Each brother is prepared to accept responsibility for what he has done, but only if that does not require his also accepting shameful personal moral failure that will destroy his sense of self: in the surgeon Walter’s case, self-centered callousness; for the policeman Victor, cowardice in facing the challenges of building a fulfilling life. The brothers’ emotional dance around each other as they seek a way out of their zero-sum situation and its competing narratives drives the action of the play.In her excellent introduction, Yuko Kurahashi, a professor of theater in the School of Theatre and Dance at Kent State University, reveals many ways in which the play’s subtlety, both as a text and in performance, can be approached. For the “Behind the Scenes” section, for example, Kurahashi interviewed not only the director of the 2017 Arena Stage production of the play in Washington, D.C., but also the set designer, the lighting designer, and the costume designer, Ivania Stack, who noted that the play is set in the mid-1960s, a time when the “Camelot” aura of John and Jacqueline Kennedy continued to pervade much of America. Stack modeled Esther’s new dress on a style and color the former First Lady made popular as a symbol of good taste and social class. Her clothing is intended to reveal that Esther has splurged on not merely a pretty dress but one that expresses her social aspirations, a key to her character in this production: “This suit shows her ‘adoration’ and envy for those who are wealthy and fashionable” (xviii, xxvii). That is a fine example of how productions plumb a drama’s text to reveal insights and interpretations, which is an important point to make in introductory courses about the role of spectacle in drama and the way theater differs from fiction.Kurahashi also emphasizes that the play, despite its universal themes, must be understood in its particular historical context. In his 1999 essay “The Price—The Power of the Past,” Miller explains that he wrote the 1968 play in part as a comment on America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an example of another central theme of his oeuvre: the way in which failure to acknowledge the tensions, confusions, and pretensions of the past leads to tragedy in the present and future. Kurahashi relates Miller’s concerns here to his misgivings about the vision of the human condition expressed in Theatre of the Absurd, which had arisen during the previous decade. For the absurdist, we are victims hopelessly enmeshed in a universe over which we have little control. For Miller this is too bleak a view: the point of literature should be to guide us to insights through which we can improve our lives and our cultures. He saw little point in writing if progress is inherently futile (xi, xiii, xxiii).In suggesting approaches to character analysis, Kurahashi reminds us of Miller’s depiction of brothers and parents in many of his plays, such as The Man Who Had All the Luck, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman, and then extends her discussion by asking us to consider Miller’s brothers and those in Sam Shepard’s True West (xiv). She also considers the brothers as examples of “unreliable narrators,” a topic that has been given significant attention in narratology studies concerning how audiences interpret and come to understand texts (xiv).For me, Kurahashi’s best insights into characters in The Price are in her discussion of the furniture dealer Gregory Solomon (xi–xiii). She sees Solomon as a representative of the entire history of the Jews filtered for Miller through his own family and Jewish heritage. The battles, misunderstandings, and self-serving cruelties of the brothers are thus presented as small, personal instances of broad traits inherent in humanity and its history. Kurahashi writes that Solomon isI had seen how Solomon serves as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the action in this play, but I had not considered him as the expression of history and heritage, a symbol of tensions, passions, and challenges inherent in human culture. Kurahashi asks us to look at Victor and Walter’s struggles—indeed, at all our personal lives—as a microcosm of pervasive issues about struggles for dignity, denial, and the possibility of resilience that pervade human history and culture. For me, that was among the most interesting ideas she presented about ways in which we should engage with the play. It is Milleresque of her to ask us to consider the personal and the social/historical together: “how these matters all connect” (xiii).The Price is beginning to gain recognition not just as one of Miller’s finest plays but as a worthy addition to the canon of twentieth-century American drama: a play that not only reflects our culture and its conflicting values but also helps us understand how that culture and its tensions shape the way we mold, understand, and criticize ourselves. It is among Miller’s most explicitly personal plays, and although he lived his life in a grander way than most of us can share, we learn much from exploring how his needs and misgivings are like our own. This is a fine play, and Yuko Kurahashi provides many insightful suggestions to guide our engagement with it.