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Mark Ruffalo and Danny DeVito
photo: Joan Marcus
Like a long overdue rematch between two heavy-weight
contenders, the resurrected conflict between two estranged brothers in “Arthur
Miller’s The Crucible” 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
to the credit 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 a unnecessary
y 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.
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