“If it don’t break, there’s no more possibilities.” So says Solomon (Paul Barry), a 90-year-old antiques appraiser, to his client, nearly-retired Manhattan beat cop Victor Franz (Mel Shrawder). What Solomon means is that if the furnishings of your life are made to last forever, it can be hard to conceive of ever changing them. It’s 1967, a time when many things are splintering, breaking down, and becoming disposable, and in these days, as Solomon says, people resist buying so irrevocably. The backdrop of the era hangs in contrast to the stack of rugged childhood furniture that Victor must finally dispose of in Arthur Miller’s The Price (directed by Lisa DiFranza at Portland Stage Company).
After 16 years of estrangement, it’s taken the scheduled demolition of an old brownstone to get Victor and his wife Esther (Moira Driscoll) together with Victor’s doctor brother Walter (Charles Stransky). Long ago, Victor sacrificed a career in science to care for their father, who was wiped out by Black Tuesday, while Walter blithely went off to medical school. Over the years, resentments and interpretations of their past have become solid, immovable things. Now, the old furnishings of their youth have finally got to go, and it’s time for serious appraisal of all the armoires, and other life decisions. “The price of used furniture is a viewpoint,” rules Solomon, the comic relief and wise fool, in the metonym of the hour. “And if you can’t understand the viewpoint, you can’t understand the price.”
The Franzes’ literal view of the old furniture sweeps high and low along the steep rake of Bryon Winn’s set. Downstage, near the lowest point, are the most fraught objects of the brothers’ youth: Their father’s chair, in their minds’ eyes clearly occupied by his ghost, and an aged crank phonograph that plays an old amusement known as a “laughing record” — just half a dozen voices in hysterics. Upstage, at greater heights, bureaus, tables, and chairs are piled high, and in a beautifully ethereal touch on Winn’s part, a few armoires, birdcages, and oars have escaped realism and gravity to hang suspended above the rest. They lead the eyes upward as the lines of a cathedral might, and bring the realm of Things into the loftier realm of the Mind, its suspensions, and its rafters.
There’s a real sensitivity in how the cast moves about all this old stuff, lifting, gazing, laying hands here and there. Shrawder, particularly, makes his interactions with the objects fraught with recognizable feeling, evoking the worth — and the cost — of the old things with as much eloquence as any lines in Miller’s fine script.
With each other, appraisal is even more emotional, and DiFranza’s direction is particularly deft in the nuances of how Miller’s characters relate. When Victor and Esther first greet Walter, they warily search each other for cues — should they angle for handshakes or embraces? The brothers approach each other like opposing force-fields, each with his own gravity to maintain. The breakdown of Shrawder’s Victor, from working-class affability to a raw, searching anger, is both devastating and a relief. Walter’s insecurities are lavishly cloaked, in Stransky’s hands, in the forced jocularity of the wealthy, and to see him stripped is wrenching. Driscoll makes beautiful work of sassy Esther’s own rises and falls, revealing the woman’s strength and frustrations without ever wallowing too long in shrillness and sarcasm. And as the dignified clown and catalyst Solomon, Barry is both profound and delightful. With his feisty, limping carriage and his lusty guffaws, Barry’s Solomon makes a strength of weakness, and a redeeming laugh of strength.
