"Grace' and "The Price' (3rd review)

Upstairs, downstairs at the Walnut:
What Arthur Miller could learn from Grace

JIM RUTTER

On successive nights recently, I saw two of the three plays currently running at the Walnut Street Theatre: the Walnut Street’s revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price, and the Luna Theatre’s Philadelphia-area premiere of Craig Wright’s Grace.

Each takes place on a single set (the attic of a Manhattan brownstone and overlapping units in a Florida condo complex); both contain four characters; and both explore big themes. In the course of each play, the main characters discover that most (if not all) of what they believed about their lives was a lie—in The Price because of a father’s manipulation of his son’s sense of duty, in Grace because of a true believer’s overly optimistic sense of how complete adherence to a heavenly father will always favor his goals. In a world where financial concerns often make a devastating impact, what’s at stake for the characters in both plays is some answer that would justify their entire lives.

But all similarities quickly end, as the Walnut Street’s lackluster staging and lumbering pace all but intentionally display the dated, stale thesis of The Price, particularly when compared to Luna director Greg Campbell’s forceful production of Wright’s highly relevant play about the failure of a comprehensive belief system to adequately deal with a haphazard reality.

The difference is in the acting

One of the biggest differences between these productions lies in the acting. You won’t find a more compelling performance on stage right now (or this season) than Chris Faith’s role as the inspired and devout hotel-developer Steve in Luna’s Grace. “My gift is Faith,” he tells us early, “I’m a believer, not a knower,” and through adherence to the principles he learned as a prayer warrior at the “Believer’s Conference,” he plows through all contrary evidence and the reality of his senses to pursue his singular goal of serving the Lord through the development of a “Where would Jesus stay?” concept of Bible-themed hotels. He’s a bullying proselytizer blind to the devastating consequences of his beliefs (on his own life), yet he engenders sympathy while confusing the audience about the extent to which an allergic reaction contributes to the homicides he eventually commits. To call his wracked and shifting performance sensational (as Toby Zinman did in the Feb. 1 Inquirer) is almost an understatement.

By the extremest of contrasts, as the duty-prone son Victor in The Price, Andy Prosky’s unintentionally humorous overacting all but eliminated the possibility of seeing a devastating production of lies, betrayal and the eventual uncovering of truth. Paralyzed by indecision born of past decisions, Victor can’t recognize “the price” he’s paid in buying into the lie that his father was rendered helpless by the Great Depression. However, Andy Prosky’s grudge-bearing police officer finds expression only in childlike histrionics, and his martyrdom becomes a bitter reminder of Camus’s statement that “too many people now climb onto the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance.”

It’s the relevance, stupid

Yet it’s the themes, above all, that offer the greatest contrast in the effects of these productions. As Vic’s older brother Walter (John Prosky) slowly overcomes the shame he feels for having abetted their father’s deception, he finally tells Victor, “What you had here was a straight financial arrangement.” And for Miller, the family breakdown parallels a general disruption in a society consumed by material concerns, offering one more dramatic indictment of our materialist culture.

Sorry, but anyone who still believes (as Broad Street Review’s Anne R. Fabbri apparently does) that theatergoers or critics should praise a play for condemning “materialism” has missed the last two decades, in which a collective neurosis about prosperity has replaced any outdated concerns about the way in which materialism leaves us empty and hollow. And let us give thanks for that. What alternative to materialism, pray tell, should we critics praise? Enlightened poverty?

But religion, at least in America, has no intention to cash out of the marketplace of ideas so quickly. In Grace, Amanda Schoonover (as the wife, Sara), opens the play wearing an “I Heart Huckabee” T-shirt, presumably referencing the political candidate her character would likely endorse, and demonstrating director Campbell’s recognition that, for many Americans, these beliefs are still all-consuming. And where both plays show the effects on the characters when they realize the limits of their beliefs, far more people today can identify with Steve’s universal plight, screaming at the heavens and asking, “Is this how it’s supposed to happen?”

Miller’s ideas still seem wrapped in 1930s dime-store packaging, and the “emptiness” someone might feel over Wal-Mart rarely strikes us as poignantly as Wright’s exploration of the problem of how anyone should react when “bad things happen to good people— especially when, like Job, they’re righteous in the service of virtue.

Style matters

One of the theater’s master propagandists, George Bernard Shaw, knew enough to “sugarcoat the bitter pill” of social reform by embedding his radical ideas inside comedies like Major Barbara and Man and Superman. Picking up where Shaw left off, the Emmy-nominated Wright shows that the best way to discuss ideas today (religious or otherwise) requires putting them in a plot full of riveting action— in this case, a murder mystery.

Were Arthur Miller alive today, I’d tell him to take notes, even though he’s got little excuse, since he wrote half of his plays in the TV era that now shapes our expectations of drama. The Price, filled with long stretches of exposition about the past, plays like a veritable snooze-fest, particularly under Michael Carleton’s direction, where even the moments that contain real, plot-driving dialogue find little tension. Where Miller is almost all talk, there’s a love triangle, murder, attempted suicide, religious conversion and a real battle of wills—between each character and God in Wright’s drama.

Genuine vs. phony substance

Moreover, Grace is a play about the limits of all beliefs, seamlessly noting parallels between atheism/agnosticism in the love-triangle’s third character Sam (Chris Fluck), a NASA scientist charged with figuring out how to debunk the interference-based noise from messages sent back from probes at the edge of the galaxy. In one of the play’s most compelling moments, Sam tries to explain his scientific mission by asking, “How can we know what we need to know when what we need to know comes from so far away?”

Compare this to The Price, which seemingly out of nowhere offers grand statements like, “So many things that sound important, looking back, they’re ridiculous,” and “The big decision is always the one you don’t realize you’re making.” Whom did Miller write this for— people suffering a mid-life crisis or a high-school graduation? And could Miller have been any more obvious by giving the “wise old man” character the name “Solomon?”

Sleepy or exhausted?

At the end of The Price, I thought to myself, “That was about an hour too long.” I was surprised then to look at my watch and realize that only two-and-a-half hours had passed. Grace I wanted to go on forever. In both cases, I could barely get out of my chair— sleepy in the cushioned seats after imbibing stale ideas at the Walnut, exhausted at the Luna after being gripped by the throat and pinned to my chair for 90 minutes by the intensity of Wright’s play and Faith’s performance.

I can’t speak for the kind of audience that first sat through and presumably enjoyed the Walnut Street’s premier of Miller’s play 40 years ago. But these competing productions make it very clear that Grace, written in 2004, now embodies theater’s true dramatic power, showing the consequences of ideas played out in the actions of real people right in front of us. Today, by contrast, The Price just displays the consequence of bad decisions, and uninteresting decisions at that.

The Walnut’s artistic directors might want to ride the elevator upstairs and see how a young and hungry theater company has learned to ensnare audiences with stunning productions of thrilling new plays. Maybe they’ll offer to switch spaces.♦


To read another review by Lesley Valdes, click here.