Like a long overdue rematch between two heavy-weight contenders, the resurrected conflict between two estranged brothers in Arthur Miller’s The Price remains, as always, an entertaining but also long-winded slice of life. A good cast—Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub, Jessica Hecht, and a sensational Danny DeVito—are undoubtedly giving their all to director Terry Kinney for the Roundabout Theatre Company. Faced by family circumstance to come to grips with the past as well as the future, one brother—an unmotivated and discouraged 50 year-old policeman about to be retired—and the other—a hyper-motivated and successful surgeon reconnecting with life after a breakdown—are thrown into a memory-filled arena as real as it is theatrical. And although theatrical realism, so as not to be boring, is often seen as an intensification of life, it is to Miller’s credit (as well as that of director Kinney), that this very human but agonizing play succeeds not so much with crafty intensifications but more with its subjective implications. The implications in The Price are quite simple. it is that whatever personal motives we have and whatever choices we make in life are first and lastly not blamable. Having forfeited his college career in order to care for a father who had been both emotionally and financially crippled by the Depression, the cop finds himself, 16 years after the father’s death, bargaining in the attic of a soon-to-be-demolished Manhattan brownstone with a 90 year-old second hand furniture dealer. Left alone by his anxious wife to negotiate with this “ethical” wheeler-dealer on a price for all the furnishings and nostalgic bric-a-brac, the cop is suddenly confronted with the appearance of his brother. The play, a series of circuitous and largely veiled excuses and other reasons for their estrangement, implies more than it discloses. As we discover from the verbal jousting, the truth of the past is generally clouded by their emotions. There is no lack of humor. Until he is relegated to a back room, the old appraiser referees the opening rounds with his philosophically profound grab bag of New York-styled Jewishisms. As the repressed skeletons in the attic begin their dance, the age old ritual of fraternal misunderstandings is played out with great theatricality. It is difficult not to respond as our sympathies change from one brother to another. There is an ever increasing poignancy in Ruffalo’s performance as the cop as he brings us deeper in his reasons for his personal and career-altering sacrifices. Shalhoub keeps us glued to the other brother’s sometimes condescending but always pragmatic sense of self righteousness. But it remains for the absolutely dynamite DeVito to earn our total affection as the appraiser who can still find time to sit down and eat a hard-boiled egg. It probably the role itself that keeps Hecht from being able to unlock the true feelings within her complicated character. Kinney has invested this soul-searching play with the patience that it probably deserves even when our patience with its issues wears a bit thin. The usually brilliant set designer Derek Malone placed an unnecessary burden on the play by hanging pristine-looking furniture from the rafters and compromising the play’s stake in reality. Perhaps a little dust and few cobwebs would have helped.
