"The Price' at the Walnut (2nd review)

The 'greatest generation,' the '60s generation,
and the prices they paid

DAN ROTTENBERG

In The Price, Victor Franz and his wife Esther are a middle-aged New York couple waiting for their lives to begin, unaware that it can’t happen without their assent. After 20 years on the police force, Vic is eligible for a pension but won’t quit because he can’t imagine what else he’d do. Esther pushes him to get a new life but can’t conceive of getting a life of her own. They’re inmates in a psychological prison but they don’t know it.

Vic’s surgeon brother Walter inhabits another kind of psychological prison, having seized life’s opportunities maybe a little too quickly: He’s a material success and an emotional failure, with a broken marriage and bankrupt businesses. The two brothers haven’t spoken to each other in 16 years, during which time they’ve nurtured their mutual envies and resentments instead of building a mutual support system.

The baby boomer’s lament

When it first appeared 40 years ago, Arthur Miller’s drama of middle-aged sibling rivalry was something of a revelation, especially to Miller’s own contemporaries who were raised in the Great Depression. (Miller was born in 1915; his character Vic, by my calculation, was born in 1917.) It’s still a moving evening, especially when portrayed by a pair of real-life brothers (Andy Prosky as Vic and John Prosky as Walter).

But to baby boomers like me— inundated with psychological jargon— Miller’s psychological revelations seem old hat. Surely it’s at least a generation since Jeanne Moreau famously observed, “It is not the rich who are powerful; it is the people who feel themselves free.” (Come to think of it, as early as 1984 I myself wrote, “In so many conflicts, the real battle is not with our enemies; it takes place within ourselves.”) Doesn’t everybody— or at least every theatergoer— grasp this concept by now?

No surprise, then, that in the first act of The Price I found myself fidgeting impatiently and even dozing off at Miller’s familiar script devices, all building to some predictably dark manufactured revelation in the second act.

So why, then, did I find myself riveted and even choking back tears during that second act?

The generation that licked Hitler

The answer is surely personal. My parents, born in 1916 and 1917, were the exact contemporaries of Arthur Miller and his fictitious Victor Franz. They belonged to the so-called “Greatest Generation,” the one that licked both the Great Depression and Hitler. But to my high school classmates and I, born in 1942 and 1943, our elders didn’t seem all that great.

We were the very first Americans to grow up with no conscious memory of either the Depression or World War II. People only a year or two older than I am still recall nightmares of Japs and Krauts breaking into their homes to slaughter their families, and consequently they grew up eternally grateful to their parents for bequeathing them a world of peace and prosperity.

But peace and prosperity was something my classmates and I took for granted in the ‘50s. We looked at adults and saw only conformity, materialism and racism. (They wanted jobs and security; we wanted meaningful jobs and adventure.) As the “Kennedy class,” who entered college in 1960 — the only class whose college years embraced JFK’s Camelot term in the White House— we were determined to fix those evils. And to some extent we did— at least until Kennedy was shot and the positive reform impulses of the early ’60s were supplanted by the nihilistic youth revolt of the later ’60s.

Of bank runs and soup kitchens

Miller surely wrote The Price for his own generation, which in 1968 constituted the largest bulk of Broadway theatergoers. In effect he was feeling their pain, reminding them that the price they had paid by growing up in the Great Depression was psychological as well as material. It’s one thing to talk about soup kitchens, runs on banks and stockbrokers jumping out windows; it’s another to make you feel what was happening inside people’s psyches— people who couldn’t themselves articulate what was happening inside their psyches. In 1968 Miller made that connection with his audience but not with me.

But the other night at the Walnut this production did, by the end, give me a better sense of how the adversities of my parents’ world differed from mine. The Price is speaking to new generations now that derive new lessons from it, lessons that Miller might not have dreamed of. That’s one test of good theater.



To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.