"A Pointy Reckoning": Arthur Miller's Women

by Alisa Solomon

[John Proctor is the Villain opened on Broadway last Monday, the 14th, one of several new plays that provide a woman’s perspectives to the works of Arthur Miller like The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, and other iconic American dramas.  In American Theatre’s Spring 2025 issue (vol. 41, no. 3), theater journalist and professor Alisa Solomon presents “A Pointy Reckoning,” a look at these plays.  (Solomon’s article was also posted on the AT website as “The Revolt of Arthur Miller’s Women” on 8 April 2025.)]

A spate of new plays sticks up for the women in Arthur Miller’s iconic dramas.

They are among the most famous words spoken by a woman in a canonical American play: “Attention must be paid.” It’s Linda Loman, of course, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, admonishing her oldest son, Biff, to show his late father some respect. “He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog,” Linda insists. “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

[Death of a Salesman premièred at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway on 10 February 1949 and closed on 18 November 1950 after 742 performances. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, and starred Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, Howard Smith as Charley, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy. It was nominated for and won the Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Kennedy), Best Scenic Design (Jo Mielziner), Producer (Dramatic) (Kermit Bloomgarden and Walter Fried), Author, and Director, as well as the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play. Death of a Salesman has been revived on Broadway five times and has played around the world and in regional, community, and school theaters countless times. It’s also been adapted for films and television broadcasts.]

“Such a person” was understood in a number of ways when Salesman opened on Broadway in 1949. It could refer to an abstract “capitalized Human Being without being anyone, a suffering animal who commands helpless pity,” as Mary McCarthy [1912-89; novelist, critic, and political activist] put it, or a heroic striver playing by the rules yet beaten down by a punishing capitalist system, the hero of what Miller [1915-2005] called a tragedy of “the common man.”

One thing “such a person” absolutely didn’t mean then: a woman. On the contrary, for Miller, in order for a protagonist to confront a moral test within the social sphere, he had to be male. The main women in Salesman—and in Miller’s other most studied and produced play, The Crucible—are a dutiful, chore-laden wife (Linda Loman; Elizabeth Proctor) and a sexual temptress (the otherwise unnamed “Woman” with whom Willy has an affair; Abigail Williams). The issue isn’t that these characters are weak or unbelievable in their contexts. The problem is structural: The erotic lure of the Woman and of Abigail is what catalyzes the hero’s self-sacrificing downfall in both plays.

[After starting a try-out run at The Playhouse in Wilmington, Delaware, from 15 to 17 January 1953 (four performances), The Crucible débuted at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) on 22 January, starring Arthur Kennedy as John Proctor, E. G. Marshall as Rev. Hale, Beatrice Straight as Elizabeth Proctor, and Madeleine Sherwood as Abigail Williams. The production was produced by Kermit Bloomgarden and directed by Jed Harris. Miller felt that this production was too stylized and cold, and the reviews for it were largely hostile (although the New York Times noted “a powerful play [in a] driving performance”).

[On 22 June 1953, the production, with Miller assuming the directorship, opened with a new cast (including Marshall replacing Kennedy as Proctor and Maureen Stapleton in for Straight as Elizabeth Proctor), a simplified set and substituted curtains, and an added scene; the new production succeeded. Crucible won the 1953 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Featured Actress in a Play (Straight). The production closed on 11 July 1953 after 197 performances.]

Over the decades feminist critics and scholars too numerous to name have grappled productively with Miller’s reliance on the old madonna/whore dichotomy and with his narrow ideas of masculinity. More recently, though, it is playwrights who have been taking on the gender issues that Miller seemed oblivious to, as the Broadway marquee currently proclaiming John Proctor is the Villain makes plain. The play with that table-turning title, by Kimberly Belflower, is one of at least nine American works for the stage that fire feminist rejoinders to Miller. They too demand that attention must be paid, but reorient what—and to whom—it is due.

[John Proctor is the Villain was commissioned by The Farm Theater in Brooklyn, New York, for their College Collaboration Project and first workshopped in 2018 and 2019 in the theater departments of three colleges: Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

[The final version of the play was premièred by the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., from 27 April until 5 June 2022. A subsequent production was staged at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston from 8 February until 10 March 2024. John Proctor is the Villain opened at the Booth Theatre in New York City on 14 April 2025 and is scheduled to end its limited run on 6 July. The Broadway production is directed by Danya Taymor and stars Sadie Sink as the blunt-speaking deus ex machina, Shelby Holcomb.]

Different as these plays are from each other in form, tone, focus, and perspective, they all signal urgently through the sexist smog that has risen off these American classics in the nearly three-quarters of a century since they were written. Five of these new plays riff on The Crucible (1953) and three on Salesman (1949), and one [A Woman Among Women by Julia May Jonas; see below] takes inspiration from All My Sons (1946). Some frame the Miller work under scrutiny as a play-not-quite-within-the-play (Belflower’s play; Katie Forgette’s Mrs. Loman is Leaving; Sheri Wilner’s Kingdom City). Others take a sophisticated fan-fic tack by setting Miller’s characters in plots that come before, or after (Liz Duffy Adams’s Witch Hunt; Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman; Barbara Cassidy’s Mrs. Loman; Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor).

[All My Sons is a three-act play written in 1946. After tryouts at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut (9-11 January 1947), and the Colonial Theatre in Boston (13-27[?] January), it opened on Broadway at the Coronet Theatre on 29 January and closed on 8 November 1947, running for 328 performances. The production was produced by Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman, directed by Kazan, and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. It starred Ed Begley as Joe Keller, Beth Merrill as Kate Keller, Arthur Kennedy as Chris Keller, and Karl Malden as George Deever, and won both the Tony Award for Best Author and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play. The play was adapted for films in 1948 and 1987, and has had many revivals on Broadway, across the United States, and around the world.

[Mrs. Loman is Leaving premièred at Seattle, Washington’s ACT Contemporary Theatre from 12 to 27 October 2024. Kingdom City was developed at Launch Pad at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2010 and premièred at La Jolla Playhouse, on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, from 23 September to 5 October 2014. Witch Hunt was workshopped at PlayPenn New Plays Conference in 2012 (with a reading on 21 July) and premièred at the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (17-21 July 2013), under the title A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World (for a report on an earlier CATF, see “Contemporary American Theater Festival (2004)” [8 July 2015]).

[Wife of a Salesman had its world première at the Writers Theatre in Chicago in a co-production with the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre from 3 March through 3 April 2022; the Milwaukee Rep presentation ran there from 27 September to 6 November 2022. Mrs. Loman was workshopped from 5 to 20 November 2022 at The Tank in Manhattan, New York, and débuted on Off-Broadway’s Theatre Row at Theatre Five on 5-15 February 2025. The Good John Proctor had its world première by Bedlam theater company, performing at the Connelly Theater in New York City’s East Village, from 11 March to 1 April 2023.]

Some whirl into more fanciful forms that abstractly incorporate aspects of both approaches (Julia May Jonas’s A Woman Among Women; Sarah Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem). Miller has become especially ripe for such treatment in recent years for reasons that, like those that impel many of his protagonists, have to do with his reputation and with the ineluctable social forces that shape it. For one, his standing as a Classic American Playwright has been solidified for two generations. The critics who disparaged his plays as having “middlebrow” pretensions in the serious magazines of 1950s and ’60s—Eric Bentley [1916-2020], Robert Brustein [1927-2023], and Richard Gilman [1923-2006], among others—are no longer with us (neither, for that matter, are the theatre pages in the magazines that employed them). More significantly, the high/low culture distinctions they labored to uphold—with pretentious “midcult” art being the worst of all for trying to be at once hugely popular and artistically momentous—have evaporated into the postmodern ether. Nowadays, no one questions Miller’s place in America’s playwriting pantheon, even if we object to his disregard for women as potential tragic heroes. That Miller, more than Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953] or Tennessee Williams [1911-83], has also been widely regarded as a preeminent moral conscience among American dramatists, has been a further goad to the creative scrutiny of feminist playwrights.

[A Woman Among Women was developed through residencies at the North American Cultural Laboratory, The Jam at New Georges, and the Great Plains Theatre Conference. The play premièred from 15 October to 17 November 2024 at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, New York, in a coproduction with The Georges of Manhattan. Becky Nurse of Salem made its début at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California from 19 December 2019 to 29 January 2020; it later had its New York première at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater from 4-22 December 2022.]

Their countervailing plays emerged in the wake of political developments that not only spurred them on, but that surface overtly in their work. Take Ruhl’s mordant comedy, Becky Nurse of Salem, for instance. Set in 2016 in the infamous Massachusetts town, the play has as its title character the foul-mouthed, opioid-popping descendant of Rebecca Nurse, a midwife hanged for alleged witchcraft some 325 years earlier. Becky is struggling to make ends meet as she raises her teenage granddaughter. Frequently, she has to ask someone to turn down a TV blaring coverage of a Trump rally (“Lock her up! Lock her up!”). In a scene when Becky is arrested for trying, without a license, to correct the historical record by offering “The Real Tour of Salem,” the scene shifts (“bizarrely,” say the stage directions) to 1692, and Becky becomes Rebecca. A live crowd chants the same menacing words, denouncing her as a witch. Time periodically collapses and springs back in Ruhl’s play: Language, clothing, and customs change, but misogyny holds constant through the centuries.

These plays reflect, too, demands made by both the Black Lives Matter [launched in 2013] and #MeToo [launched in 2006; popularized as a hashtag in 2017] movements that Americans face up to shameful realities of our histories and to inequities that persist. Not that anyone is trying to topple Miller like a Confederate statue. Rather, the new plays resemble the contextualizing and additive materials that historians recommend placing around such monuments.

Like Becky, Adams’s, Monahon’s, and Belflower’s plays emend a factual inaccuracy in The Crucible, noting that Abigail was all of 11 years old at the time of the witch trials, and Proctor, 60—not, respectively, 17 and 30-something, as Miller deliberately rendered them to make Abigail the seductress of a male paragon of integrity. (Stacy Schiff’s [b. 1961] meticulous 2015 account of the Salem witch trials in her book, The Witches: Salem, 1692 [Little, Brown & Co., 2015], set the record straight.) In different ways, these writers call into question The Crucible’s inciting incident, Proctor’s “affair” with Abigail, and skewer the punishing patriarchal worldview of Puritan New England—and of Arthur Miller—that discredits, and often silences, women’s voices.

In her thriller Witch Hunt Or, A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, Adams picks up the story after the witch trials. Abigail, having fled Salem, returns to the region a decade later, seeking to understand why the town’s “high and powerful men” urged the girls on. “They had never listened to ones so low as us in their lives,” she says. “Now they killed people on our word.”

Setting The Good John Proctor in 1691, the year before Miller’s play is set, Monahon brings us into the dreams, drudgery, and degradations of Salem’s pubescent girls in a series of short, mystery-tinged, Caryl Churchill-like scenes. Abigail is 11 (and nonbinary), and her cousin, Betty, only 9. Using 21st-century language in a 17th-century world, Monahon connects the mistrust and exploitation of Salem’s girls to the suppression #MeToo sought to shake off.

The girls in John Proctor Is the Villain are high school students in a small town studying The Crucible in their English class and finding disturbing parallels between the old text and their own lives—rife, as they are, with creepy adult men and the adolescent upheaval of sexual feelings. Says one:

The thing this play is talking about is that pretty much all these girls had been like assaulted at some point. I mean like sexually. I read this book that says most of these girls probably had like PTSD which explains the like crazy physical fits that people thought were happening because of witchcraft but anyway so yeah like the assault stuff was everywhere. Their dads, older men in the town, stable boys, whoever . . . [.]

The reading-against-the-grain insights these students glean from The Crucible help bring local real-life abuses to light. The play culminates with the girls dancing in an ecstatic frenzy, reclaiming as feminist bonding and expression what had earlier been condemned as witchcraft.

Building dramatic action around studying or staging a Miller play provides several of the feminist playwrights opportunities for direct, even bald, commentary on the original. Forgette makes great use of this ploy in her hilarious backstage comedy, Mrs. Loman is Leaving, in which two aging actors are making their comebacks in Salesman. But there are offstage bumps: The man playing Willy is hallucinating as wildly as his character, while Joanne, the woman playing Linda, is falling apart after she learns, via text, shortly before curtain, that her husband is leaving her. Her grief and fury over her personal crisis commingle with Linda’s and color her challenge to the director’s encomiums about Willy.

I have to interrupt before you can spin out some half-baked explanation of why it’s okay for this bloviating mediocre man to treat a woman who has devoted her life to his every need. Why is she mending her stockings?! He gives stockings to his girlfriend! Where are Linda’s? WHERE ARE LINDA’S STOCKINGS!!!???

When the director retorts that Linda “represents the expectations and limitations of her gender for the time period. Women were helpmates. They supported their husbands,” Joanne replies, “That doesn’t mean that she didn’t have a personal dream of her own. What was Linda’s dream before she gave it up?”

In her sequel to Salesman, Cassidy takes up such questions, extending the psychological depth Miller grants his male characters to Linda. Mrs. Loman begins after Willy’s funeral, as Linda enrolls in college, develops a friendship with another woman who mysteriously knew Willy, and challenges her son, Happy, over his appalling misogyny. In a prequel, Wife of a Salesman, Burgess uses both strategies: She imagines Linda confronting the Woman, ahead of the moment in Miller’s plot when Biff learns of his father’s affair, potentially erasing its inciting incident. Later Burgess disrupts the action, revealing the whole thing as a play-within-the-play; the two actors performing “Wife” and “Mistress” comment on their roles and their own somewhat parallel lives.

Rather than parallel, Jonas’s characters in A Woman Among Women run aslant of Miller’s in All My Sons; of this new crop of Miller riffs, hers offers the most oblique response to the play that inspired it, as she explores his dramatic vision but swaps out his lenses for her own. All My Sons centers on a “man among men,” as Miller called Joe Keller, a respected businessman who secretly holds onto an incriminating lie to retain his stature. While reversing most of the characters’ genders and moving the action from a small Ohio town to famously multi-culti, queer-friendly Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonas borrows Miller’s backyard setting and other key elements: a central family with two grown children, one of whom is absent; a close-knit community of neighbors; high-stakes questions of moral responsibility; Aristotelian principles of tragedy.

In a note in the script, Jonas says she set out to discover what a “woman among women” might mean. Her answer not only emerges in the shape of an almost casual, fourth-wall-breaking style that features some quirky little songs. It also gives its hero, who runs a “wellness center for women,” a transgression less blatantly self-serving than Joe Keller’s—and, forsaking Miller’s certainty, a denouement that leaves everything in doubt.

It’s impossible to know what Miller himself might have made of these dramaturgical clapbacks. Forty years ago, when the Wooster Group incorporated a large chunk of The Crucible into L.S.D. (…Just the High Points), the troupe’s mash-up of a high-speed recitation of Miller’s text with passages from Timothy Leary’s [1920-96] treatise on the hallucinogen, he objected, and the show was eventually shut down. “Maybe at some point in the future,’’ Miller told The New York Times then, “the play will become a kind of public classic. But I’m still around and I should have a say about how the play is done as long as I am.”

[The New York-based experimental theater company Wooster Group morphed out The Performance Group (founded by Richard Schechner [b. 1934], Professor Emeritus at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and editor of TDR: The Drama Review, in 1967) from 1975 to 1980. Under artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte (b. 1944), it took its current name, derived from its address at 33 Wooster Street in SoHo, in 1980 but remained housed in the Performing Garage, a former metal-working factory.

[The troupe’s style is highly experimental, bending, mixing, and deconstructing genres and media, applying a lot of high-tech effects. Their performances often use familiar texts from the likes of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), and Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), which they usually reinterpret and subvert as raw ingredients.

[L.S.D. emerged over a period of collective development and workshopping in the mid-1980s. It was presented in October 1984 as a work-in-progress at The Performing Garage, then, from 22 March to 13 April 1984, Parts 1, 2, and 3 were performed, under the amended title L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .), at the Garage. On 15 April, Part 4 was added, and all four parts of L.S.D. were first performed in Boston, Massachusetts, through 13 May 1984. The play ran about 110 minutes in its complete form.

[From 27 September to 25 November 1984, L.S.D. was staged at The Performing Garage, during which run the Wooster Group received a cease-and-desist threat from Arthur Miller’s lawyers. The Group ceased performances of L.S.D. while actor-writer Michael Kirby (1931-97) wrote a new Part 2 (The Crucible section) and from 5 to 12 January 1985, L.S.D. reopened with the new version of Part 2.

[Over the next five years, the Wooster Group’s L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .) toured across the U.S. and around the world, returning to the Performing Garage in January and February 1987. It became Wooster Group’s most notorious performance piece.]

The plays are public classics now (some intellectual property restrictions notwithstanding), available to a robust playwriting tradition of theatrically talking back to canonical plays in a feminist register: Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters, Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (An Undoing), and Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief all transpose Shakespeare in this way. Such works shrewdly craft fresh stories from revered old ones to critically engage the past, the present, and the ways we construct the past in—and for—the present.

[Tracing the origins and production history of Lear’s Daughters, a “prequel” of Shakespeare’s play from the perspective of Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan, was confusing and uncertain as the record is elusive. It was commissioned in 1987 by the Women’s Theatre Group (renamed the Sphinx Theatre Company in 1999), one of the oldest women’s theater organizations in the United Kingdom, founded in 1973. Elaine Feinstein was brought in to write the dialogue with members of the collective, but the writing credits vary from listing (programs, posters, advertisements, publication) to listing.

[The script was first staged, it seems, on 12 September 1987, but whether that was in a London theater or on tour is unclear; in any case, the production went out on tour of the U.K. immediately and performed until 5 December.  There seems also to have been a staging at the Battersea Arts Center on 24 September 1987, but if it was a single showing or one of multiple performances is unknown.  Other tours followed in 1988 shortly after the first one. Revivals have been staged in recent years to mixed reviews.

[Macbeth (An Undoing), a retelling of the Shakespeare tale with Lady Macbeth at the center, premièred at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 4-25 February 2023. It transferred to the Rose Theatre, Kingston in London in 8-23 March 2024, and then Theatre for a New Audience, an Off-Broadway company in Brooklyn, New York, with the U.K. cast on 5-28 April 2024.

[Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, a reconfiguring of the Othello story from the women's point of view, premièred from 21 July to 9 August 1993 at the Bay Street Theatre, in Sag Harbor, New York, on Long Island. It moved Off-Broadway to the Circle Repertory Company in Greenwich Village from 27 October to 5 December 1993.]

One thing is certain. All nine of the feminist playwrights wrestling with their towering predecessor share one of Miller’s steadfast principles: that theatre matters, that it is the ideal sphere for examining social pressures, their fractures, and the impact they have on ordinary lives.

The word “feminist” does not appear on any of the 600 pages of Miller’s autobiography, Timebends [Grove Press, 1987]. Still, when he writes, “I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world,” he offers these new plays a full endorsement.

[Alisa Solomon (she/her), a dramaturg in New York City and a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is a long-time theater critic and general reporter for the Village Voice, Jewish Currents, The Nation, and the New York Times, among other publications.  Solomon has written two award-winning books: Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge, 1997) and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan Books, 2013).]

'27 Wagons Full of Cotton' & 'A Memory of Two Mondays' (1976)

[When I was at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts for my MFA, I took a class in criticism.  Our writing assignments included several reviews of productions both on campus and in New York City (I’ve published my review of  Fragments of a Trilogy at La MaMa E.T.C from 1976 on  9 April 2011; Broadway’s A Chorus Line on 31 August 2012; The Heiress on 24 November 2012; and Pacific Overtures on 15 May 2014) and I’ve decided to run the remaining review from that class because, nostalgia aside, it has a tiny  surprise embedded in it.  I won’t say what that is now—I’m sure you’ll spot it (and if you don’t, I’ll identify it afterwards). 

[At the time I saw these two one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton by Tennessee Williams (1911-83) and A Memory of Two Mondays by Arthur Miller (1915-2005), both playwrights were still alive and writing.  The former repertory company now called the Phoenix Theatre (founded in 1953, one of the first Off-Broadway theater companies) produced peripatetically by the 1970’s and closed in 1982.  The double bill ran in rep with Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted (adapted in 1956 into the musical The Most Happy Fella by Frank Loesser) from 13 January to 21 March 1976.

[27 Wagons, for those who don’t recognize it, was the source for the Williams screenplay for  Elia Kazan’s controversial 1956 film Baby Doll, which starred Carroll Baker, Karl Malden, and Eli Wallach   In 1977, Williams wrote a full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, based on his filmscript]

The double bill at the Phoenix Theatre’s Playhouse on Manhattan’s West 48th Street presented an interesting juxtaposition of two short plays by two of America’s most prominent contemporary playwrights.  The production of Tennessee Williams’ 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (written in 1948) and Arthur Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), both directed by Arvin Brown, provided examples of works by these two authors not generally known for humor or happy endings.

Though very different in mood, subject, and milieu, both plays deal with the fact that life goes on essentially the same in spite of apparent change.  Even personal-world shaking events do not substantially switch the tracks of life’s locomotive.

In Wagons, Williams presents a triangle involving a tobacco-chewing cotton ginner, his pocket book-clutching wife, and the riding crop-wielding Syndicate Plantation superintendent. What transpires is that the old cotton gin owner, Jake Meighan (Roy Poole), sets fire to the syndicate gin so that he will get all their ginning business.  His wife, Flora (Meryl Streep), a young, “zaftig” dim-wit, lets the fact slip that Jake left her alone for a while just before the fire broke out.  The syndicate superintendent, Silva Vicarro (Tony Musante), pushes Flora on the subject, confusing her beyond her limited capacities, and finally seduces her, with judicious use of his riding crop.  He decides not to rebuild the syndicate gin and let Jake do all his ginning while Flora entertains him with cool lemonade and a roll in the hay.

Needless to say, Jake is entirely oblivious to Flora’s agitated state after her first encounter with Silva and is delighted with his having ginned all the syndicate’s 27 wagons full of cotton and the prospect of more syndicate business.  All in all, though Flora feels her life has taken an exciting turn, life on the Meighan homestead will go on essentially unchanged.  We are given the impression that sex was not a part of the Meighan marriage.  She refers to the wild Peterson brothers with whom she went out before her marriage, but it seems unlikely that she and Jake had a sex life before or after their marriage.  His only passion is the cotton gin, and that will remain unchanged.  Before she met Silva, Flora was concerned only with her white kid purse and warm Coke.  She still clutches the purse as the play ends, her new-found lover notwithstanding.  And like the purse, stuffed with Kleenex, her life remains essentially empty since a transfer from Jake’s tobacco-spitting insensitivity to Silva’s whip-slapping sadism is not much in the end.

The production lacked smoothness in many respects.  Ms. Streep's expressively rubber face made for some hilarious moments when confronted with Musante’s legalistic cross-questioning and his riding-crop seduction.  Her use of her body, giving the impression of ungainly gracelessness, a kind of grown-up Edith Ann, was often farcical in a play that was not truly a farce.  [Edith Ann, a character created by Lily Tomlin for the TV comedy-variety show  Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In from 1969 until 1973, was a precocious pre-school girl who held forth on life as she saw it or on things for which she thought she had the answers even though she was too young to understand them.]  Musante’s nonchalant seduction techniques, casually inserting his riding crop up Ms. Streep’s dress, were the more brutal for their nonchalance.  But he never quite captured the accent—either of Silva’s native New Orleans or the Mississippi locale of the play—and this was most disconcerting.  And Mr. Poole’s Jake was a mediocre impression of Walter Brennan as Gramps McCoy without a limp.  [Gramps McCoy was a character on The Real McCoys, a popular sitcom broadcast from 1957 through 1962 on ABC and from 1962 to 1963 on CBS.]  When called upon to toss his hat on the ground in anger, it was a sloppy, empty gesture.  When he slapped his wife, trying to shield with his body that in reality he slapped his own hand, he was incapable of doing so successfully, all of which added up to an amateurish appearance.

The set, by James Tilton who also designed the lighting, was creditably seedy and run-down.  The rusted screens and faded paint appropriately reflected the faded life of the inhabitants of that corner of Mississippi.  But when Jake ran around the house to the “Chevy” presumably parked out back, he ducked behind the set, destroying the illusion that there was anything back there but black curtains.

Director Brown played up the joke of the silly old man cuckolded by his young wife, but since it became obvious right away that Silva will bed Flora sooner or later, the predictability of the situation ruins the joke. And since we know that Jake will never know the difference anyway, it’s not much of a joke at all in the end.  Finally, one doesn’t much care that anything happened.

The second half of the bill, Miller’s Mondays, was fuller and richer.  The changeless nature of life is more palpable in this story of a boy’s passing through a stage and moving beyond it.  We watch Bert, a young employee of an auto parts company played by Thomas Hulce, fulfill his dream of leaving the routine life of stockboy and going off to college in the 1930’s.  He stops long enough at one point to wonder why he got out, but the answer is obvious: he is the only one who could succeed on his own.  He alone does not belong locked away behind grimy windows.

On the first Monday, a hot summer day, we are introduced to the office personnel, each a sort of stock character without which any business would be incomplete.  There is the senior employee, Jim (Leonard Cimino), a 76-year-old kind soul, nearly blind with age and slowed down to a shuffle; the dirty old man, Gus (Roy Poole), with a neglected wife at home and a mad-on at the bosses; an office drunk, Tom (Rex Robbins), in a perpetual stupor and in danger of being fired; a raucous Irishman, Kenneth (John Lithgow), always ready with a song or a poem (Irish, of course); the bright young man, Larry (Tony Musante), who knows where everything is and how everything works; an officious office manager, Raymond (Pierre Epstein), overzealous and businesslike; a delivery man, Frank (Joe Grifasi), with a woman at every destination; the boss, Mr. Eagle (Ben Kapen), silent and intimidating; the attractive young secretary, Patricia (Meryl Streep), avoiding the office lechers while trying to catch a husband (even somebody else’s), and the old-maid receptionist, Agnes (Alice Drurnmond), who has become “one of the guys.”  Each of the men is an example of what Bert could become if he settled into the routine, and each is interchangeable with the others.

At the end of the summer Monday, Gus’s wife has died alone at home, Tom has been caught drunk by Mr. Eagle for what everyone expects is the last time, and Larry has bought a much-coveted Auburn and has extended himself beyond his means.  When the second Monday arrives, now winter and the day before Bert is to leave, Tom has become a reformed drunk, Gus is an alcoholic, and Larry has sold his Auburn.  Kenneth has taken to drink and can no longer remember his poetry, Patricia has given up on taking Larry away from his wife, and a brothel has opened across the street from the office.  On the day Bert leaves, Gus has died and the brothel has become something of little note to the workers.  Bert’s departure causes little or no stir.  He is, as he says, just another boy who worked there for a while and left.  He leaves the office essentially as it was.  Kenneth is the office drunk now, hut the rest remain as they were on the Monday in summer.  The windows are still dirty and the world is shut out.

Brown’s production moved quickly from the opening exposition and character introduction to the first crisis (Tom’s drunkenness).  From that point, the play was well-paced and flowing until the muddy interim period between the two Mondays of the title.  The transition was unclear, though one eventually realized when Bert and Kenneth donned sweaters that cold weather had set in and the second Monday must be dawning.  It was also not clear that the end of the play changes to the next day, a Tuesday, when Bert is to leave for college.  Some clearer form of transition was necessary to aid the audience in following the events of the play.  This confusion may be a fault of the script, but a good director should be expected to make it work.

Again, Tilton’s set worked well.  There was a definite air of a 1930’s office in the stock room.  The dusty windows blocking out the world and the dull walls and endless columns of parts’ shelves were symbolic of the dull routine and the endless parade of days, weeks and years in the office.

Unlike Wagons, Mondays included some marvelous character portrayals.  Roy Poole’s Gus was gruff, angry, and bathetic. We truly understood why he fell apart when his neglected wife died alone while he had been out on a weekend binge.  Leonard Cimino as Jim was not the stereotypical shuffling nearsighted oldster.  Wise, concerned, and aware, his shuffling gait and nose-close reading only made him the more real.  Clarence Felder, the truck mechanic who wandered around Manhattan for four days looking for a replacement part, was a shining ray in the grim world of the stock room.  And Joe Grifasi’s Frank, the pocket-jiggling delivery-van Don Juan was so incongruous in his appearance that one had to believe him—no one who looks like Frank would think of lying about his amorous stockpile.  Between the women, Alice Drummond stood out. As a middle-aged spinster who has been around so long she is now such a fixture in the office that the men take no notice of her as they ogle the whores across the street; she truly belonged in that office.

In toto, the overall experience was an enjoyable, entertaining one.  The Williams-Miller-Brown team is one well worth catching at the Phoenix.

[Did you catch the surprise?  Several members of the cast have names that are now familiar—Tom Hulce went on to feature in Animal House (1978) with John Belushi and then play Mozart in Amadeus (1984), for which he received an Oscar nomination, Tony Musante had played the title role in the 1973-74 TV series Toma, and John Lithgow was a Tony winner for 1973’s The Changing Room and would be nominated again in 1988 for M. Butterfly and would win another Tony in 2002 for The Sweet Smell of Success.  But of all the actors in the two one-acts, none made the name that Meryl Streep would.  Fresh from the Yale School of Drama (MFA, 1975), Streep’s performance in the double bill (for which she won a Theatre World Award and a Tony nomination) was only her second Broadway appearance (after 1975’s Trelawny of the “Wells”).

[When I saw this two-play rep, I hadn’t noticed at first that Streep was in both plays.  After seeing her as Flora in 27 Wagons, I didn’t recognize her as Patricia in Memory.  When I looked at the program after the show and saw that she had played both parts, I couldn’t believe it.  It had to have been two different actresses—they weren’t even the same size!  I remarked to my Rutgers classmates who were at the performance with me that this was an astounding performance and that the actress—whom none of us had heard of yet—was bound for greatness in the theater (movies weren’t in our thoughts at this point)—but, I insisted, she’d certainly have to change her name!  How wrong could I have been?  She did a few more years of Broadway and Off-Broadway plays, but from the mid-’70s on, she headed for film stardom and, I assume, never really looked back.  (Streep returned to OB in the 21st century for a few select appearances.)  Today, Meryl Streep is the most-nominated actress for an Oscar and one of only six actors who have won three or more Academy Awards for acting.  She’s also the recipient of more Golden Globe nominations (31) and more wins (8) than any other actor.]

'The Crucible' (Shaw Festival, 2006)

[On 8 and 11 December, after ROT published my friend Kirk Woodward’s article “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw” (3 December), I posted a two-part report on my attendance at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in August 2006.  The post was a large excerpt from a complete report of that trip from which I excised all the performance discussions except those of the two Shaw plays in that season’s bill.  One of the other plays offered that year was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and because I’ve just posted a report on another Miller production, Incident at Vichy, on 16 December, I thought it would be worthwhile to run my excerpted remarks from that 2006 production of another Miller history play.  I hope ROT readers will find the comparison interesting.]

The trip to the Shaw Festival, which was organized by the Round House Theatre of Bethesda and Silver Spring, Maryland, left on Monday, 7 August, and returned on Monday, 14 August 2006; both Mondays were travel days, allowing for five days of theater (and a little sightseeing, too, of course).  The theater pre-booked six shows for us (leaving four from which we could select however many additional performances we wanted); Miller’s The Crucible was scheduled for the 2 p.m. matinee on Wednesday, 9 August, our second performance of the trip.  The show was presented in the 850-seat Festival Theatre, the largest and newest of the Shaw’s three performance spaces, opened in 1973.  After a rather wan theater experience there the previous evening at Arthur Kopit and Cole Porter’s High Society, the 1997 musical adaptation (based on the 1956 musical film) of Philip Barry’s 1939 Philadelphia Story, it was a terrific start to a most enjoyable week of theater.

The Shaw Festival has a “mandate,” to present the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and his contemporaries.  (An explanation of this somewhat flexible directive is provided in my omnibus report on the festival.)  The Crucible was written three years after Shaw’s death, isn’t set during the Irishman’s lifetime, and even its inspiration, McCarthyism, didn’t really get started until after GBS’s death, so how did it qualify for the Shaw Festival?  In the category of plays by a GBS contemporary then, Crucible qualifies for inclusion in the festival’s program because Miller (1915-2005) lived during the latter half of Shaw’s long lifespan.  

The Crucible premièred on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) in 1953.  It ran 197 performances and garnered the 1953 Best Play Tony for Miller.  The play’s been revived on Broadway four times since then and a new mounting is scheduled to come to the Walter Kerr next year as part of the informal celebration of the playwright’s centennial this year.  (The new revival will be directed by  Ivo van Hove, the Flemish avant-garde director who is also responsible for the current, highly-praised production of Miller’s View from the Bridge at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.  The upcoming Crucible’s cast is expected to include Ciarán Hinds, and Ben Whishaw and Saoirse Ronan in their Broadway débuts.)  There have also been three Off-Broadway productions between 1958 and 1990.  In Canada, a French-language production was staged in Montreal in 1966 and that same year, an English version was presented in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  In 1961, composer Robert Ward adapted The Crucible into an opera, which won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Music Critics Circle Citation.  British Independent Television aired an adaptation in 1959 with stars including Sean Connery and Susannah York.  George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, and Melvyn Douglas starred in a CBS-TV broadcast in 1967; the BBC mounted another TV version in 1980   A French film, under the title Les sorcières de Salem and starring Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, was released in 1957 and in 1996, Miller himself wrote a film adaptation of the play (for which he received his only Oscar nomination—for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield, and many other stars from Hollywood and the British screen and stage world.  In 2014, London’s Old Vic filmed a stage production that was released as a movie in the U.K. and Ireland.

The play’s story, set in Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, unfolds during the prosecution of the infamous Salem witch trials (1692-93).  Some 20 colonists were tried for practicing witchcraft and executed during this notorious episode as neighbor turned on neighbor.  Miller was already researching the story and considering it as the basis for a play in 1952 when his friend Elia Kazan, the Group Theater member who had directed Miller’s first two stage successes, 1947’s All My Sons and 1949’s Death of a Salesman, was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known informally and universally as the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC).  HUAC (abetted by Wisconsin’s Joseph McCarthy in the Senate) was on its own witch hunt in the 1950s, searching everywhere for communists.  It was focusing on the American entertainment business, both television and film in Hollywood and theater in New York.  Once again, friend turned on friend and colleague on colleague.  Informing on others who might have associated with communist or socialist organizations as long ago as the 1930s was encouraged—and failing to do so could end in an actor’s, director’s, or writer’s imprisonment for contempt of Congress, while those implicated, even just suspected, would face, first, blacklisting in their industry and, second, incarceration.  As in Salem, little proof was required—just someone to point an accusatory finger.  Kazan, who’d been called once before, decided to name names rather than face the ruin of his nascent and burgeoning career as a successful film director. 

Miller saw parallels between HUAC’s and Tail-Gunner Joe’s commie witch hunts in the 1950s and the Salem trials in the 1690s.  This is what The Crucible was intended to examine in the story of John and Elizabeth Proctor, a Salem farmer and his wife caught up in the midst of communal hysteria and fear, duplicity and self-serving denunciation by one neighbor against another, one former friend against another.  Miller used actual transcripts and records of the hearings as the basis for his script—though, of course, he took some artistic license to create the drama.  The play still speaks powerfully to us today, even though HUAC and Joe McCarthy are both gone—and so is Soviet communism.  The spirit of McCarthyism continually raises its ugly head, both abroad and in our own country (think Islamophobia, for instance, or a few decades ago, Japanophobia, the fear that the Japanese were buying up the whole country).  Witch hunts, it seems, never really go out of style.  The witch-hunters just find new targets.

After John Proctor, a married man and independent-minded farmer, decides to break off his affair with 17-year-old Abigail Williams, Reverend Samuel Parris’s niece, she leads other local girls in a magical ceremony in the woods at night to cast a spell on Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth, to cause her death.  When the girls are discovered dancing with Tituba, Reverend Parris’s slave who practices voodoo in secret, they are brought to trial for practicing witchcraft.  Accusations begin to fly, often for motives more temporal than spiritual, and a literal witch hunt gets underway.  Before long, Elizabeth Proctor is suspected of witchcraft, and John’s attempt to defend her only makes matters worse and he ends up in the dock, too.  Soon, the entire village is embroiled in the hunt for witches and every settler is either an accused or an accuser.  Those who confess to witchcraft will be spared execution and many do so, but Proctor and some others refuse to make false confessions.  In the end, Proctor will hang, though the play ends before he goes to his death.

Some critics apparently felt that Benedict Campbell’s Proctor was too strong a man to have been tempted by Charlotte Gowdy’s Abigail.  I didn’t agree.  Aside from the fact that the fall of such a man makes the situation the more dramatic, I see no contradiction in the fall of a strong man at the hands of a weaker woman.  I believe it has happened—both in life and in literature.  Further, I don’t see Abigail, no matter who plays her, as so ineffectual: she does launch and maintain the conspiracy; she faces down the threats and intimidations of both Proctor and Danforth; and she keeps the girls under her control, especially the erstwhile defector Mary Warren (Trish Lindstrom), even right under the gaze of all the powers of Salem.  I had no problem with this pairing.

The other ensemble members were all good, carving out believable personae for their characters, both the righteous ones and the benighted, venal ones.  This was an ensemble production—I didn’t mean to single Campbell out for his acting; it was just the role that made him need comment—and the company portrayed a convincing community, albeit one coming apart at the seams from internal conflicts.  (This may be the one major fault in the play in production as far as its political point is concerned: even Jim Mezon's Deputy Governor Danforth, the self-righteous inquisitor, is understandable in his wrong-headedness.  Not forgivable—but understandable.  It was totally correct for the actor to play him this way—as a flawed human who believes in what he’s doing even when he’s wrong—but as a political allegory, he should be inhuman and evil, like, say, Dick Cheney, Vladimir Putin, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.)  The acting in The Crucible was all at a very high pitch.  In almost any other case, it would probably have been considered over-the-top scenery-chewing.  Here, it just seemed appropriate.  After all, think about what’s happening to these people: they’re being accused of the most heinous crime possible in their society—consorting with the devil.  Not only that, but it’s a false charge based on lies no one wants to acknowledge.  They’re caught in gigantic Chinese fingercuffs: the harder they struggle to get out, the tighter they’re bound.  And the end result isn’t jail or loss of property, it’s death—death and ignominy their families will have to live with after they’re gone.  If that’s not reason to rant and fulminate, I don’t know what is. 

The acting, as I intimated, was excellent.  Bernard Behrens, for instance, does a wonderfully fractious Giles Corey.  I especially noted the way the actors handled the array of local characters in the village.  This company demonstrated that they have the skill  to focus on bit characters with the same care that British casts apply (especially in films and television).  This was particularly in evidence in Crucible, though Miller’s characters are much more fleshed out in the text; there is even an edition of the published script with historical character notes from the playwright’s research.  I’ll draw a conclusion from perhaps insufficient evidence and say that this acting skill, the focus on incidental characters, is an inheritance Canadian actors received from the decades during which they were an adjunct of British theater up till the middle/late ’50s and early ’60s.  I know Canadian theater (and culture in general) struggled to carve out its own identity, separate from both its former British colonial overlords and its behemoth neighbor to the south, but it seems to me (being an outsider and not so emotionally invested in the struggle) that the theater, at least, has gotten some benefit from that long tutelage.  At the same time, they handle the Stanislavsky/Method stuff pretty well, too—something the Brits have only come to terms with in the past few decades.  So, in the short run at least, the Canadians got the best of both theater worlds.

The Crucible was the first production of the festival where I began to notice the design.  (In almost all of the festival presentations, the sets, especially, were remarkable elements of the productions.)  I’m not sure that I can adequately describe the kinetic set, so you may just have to accept my assertion that it was striking and intriguing.  The designer is Peter Hartwell, whose work I don’t know but he’s designed for many top U.S. companies, including New York’s Public Theater.  (The whole production design is good: costumes by Teresa Przybylski; lights by Kevin Lamotte; and original music by Paul Sportelli, the Shaw’s musical director for eight seasons.)  The performance started with a scrim across the proscenium opening, painted with a black-and-white forest as if we were standing in its midst.  The sounds of a Puritan hymn filtered in and we saw the enlarged shadows of people from the waist up, their arms raised to heaven.  As the people moved forward and the shadows shrank to human proportions, Sportelli’s music, based on the Puritan hymn, became distorted and skewed to make it sound ominous and frightening in contrast to the flat, univocal sound—the Puritans apparently didn’t approve of harmony—when the hymns were sung in church.  As the scrim rose, the townspeople scattered and we were in the upper floor of the house of Reverend Parris (Ric Reid), the bedroom of his afflicted daughter, Betty (Katie Cambone-Mannell).  (A variation on the scrim technique was used again at the top of act two.)   

The playing area was a square of raw planks in the center of the stage; the surrounding areas of the stage were dim and ambiguous.  Over the actors’ heads was a huge wooden frame filled in by panels of Plexiglas like a giant window or skylight.  The frame was angled like a slanted roof, but there were objects attached to it—a baby carriage, for instance—and there was a door in it.  Attached to the frame at the stage-left edge of the platform was a wheel like a small waterwheel.  When the scene changed—to Proctor’s first-floor room, for example—the frame rotated as if driven by the wheel, like a gigantic grinding mill—a dark Satanic mill—or a torture rack, coming to rest in a different position.  It formed the back wall of the room behind the court (hence the door), the ceiling of Proctor’s front room (parallel to the floor this time), and the wall of the cell in which Proctor is tempted by Danforth, Reverend John Hale (Peter Krantz), and Reverend Parris to sign his confession while he confronts his wife. 

All the set (with the exception, of course, of the clear plastic windows) was rough wood—planks, timbers, beams.  The few pieces of furniture—Betty Parris’s bed, the Proctors’ table, the benches at the court, and such.—were all crude, simple constructions as you might imagine in a 17th-century Puritan colonial village.  Though the set was fragmentary, all the elements—the furniture, props, and costumes—were essentially naturalistic (however symbolically they were used), as was the acting, yet the whole thing had an air of Russian Constructivism to it—an (infernal) machine for acting.  One significant design element was stylistically opposed to the basically naturalistic unit.  It seemed as if designer Hartwell was evoking a threatening and torturous world driving the little village of Salem.  It was all very effective.

I did have one, small problem with the staging—a directorial misstep, I think, rather than a design error.  For almost all of the play, that square, plank platform demarked the "on stage" playing area—the limits of the rooms in which the action took place.  Off the platform, between it and the wings, was no-man’s land—ambiguous territory.  No actor violated this space in any of the scenes, except in the second set that represented the Proctors’ first floor.  Characters entered and exited the house by walking across the no-man’s strip at stage left, and that was fine.  It should have represented the "outside" of the house.  But several times, when characters were coming and going (when the court officers arrived to arrest Elizabeth Proctor), several delivered lines from the ambiguous area as if they were still inside the house.  If they had indicated somehow that they were talking to someone inside while they were outside, that would have passed, but they didn’t.  It broke what I thought was established convention for the production, and I didn’t know why the director, Tadeusz Bradecki, did it.  There were about a half dozen people in the scene, and I wondered if the director thought it had gotten too crowded—but, first of all, I didn’t see that problem and, second, if he had to move some actors off to disperse the scene, there should be some adjustment to show that they are now outdoors.  The acting was far too good for this to have been just bad acting, a failure to execute a minor technical adjustment. 

Some in our group questioned another directorial choice, with which I had no trouble.  In the final scene, when Proctor first confronts his wife alone after months of imprisonment and separation, a lot of the Round House spectators thought Elizabeth (Kelli Fox) or John ought to have crossed in and embraced, or at least touched, the other.  Bradecki had them standing at pretty much opposite sides of the cell—and I saw this as perfectly appropriate under the circumstances as the production played them.  The psychological gulf between them, from John’s adultery, Elizabeth’s sense of guilt for having driven him to that and her slowness to have forgiven him, his dilemma over making a false confession so he can stay with her for the year she’s been granted to bear her child, her reluctance to persuade him either way—all these and other emotional burdens made a hesitancy to embrace perfectly acceptable to me.  As it happened, that was how Jackie Maxwell, the Shaw’s artistic director, explained director Bradecki’s reasoning, more or less, when someone raised that question at the Round House cocktail party later that evening.  I had no trouble buying it.  I also think the tension from what seemed like John’s and Elizabeth’s need to connect but fear of doing so made the scene more painful, which is right, too.

I know lots of people dismiss The Crucible as no longer relevant, somewhat precious, or politically suspect/naive, but I’ve always liked it.  I think Miller’s point is powerful and valid—perhaps even more today than it has been at any time since the 1950s—and the parallels he found or devised between the witch trials and the McCarthy probes are remarkable, especially considering how much they are based on actual 17th-century records.  (The fact that there are records of those trials is remarkable in itself—but that’s not a theater issue.)  Sitting and watching this then-53-year-old play made me realize very palpably how far backwards we’ve gone in recent years—and how very dangerous and frightening that is.  As powerful an indictment of McCarthyist society Crucible was in 1953, it is just as clear a warning for our era of Patriot Acts, Guantanamo prison camps, and warrantless wiretaps. 

I did wonder how the Canadians respond to this play since it isn’t about their society and Miller isn’t speaking to them directly.  Canada is the target of terrorism, too, of course, and there have been Canadian troops fighting—and dying—in Afghanistan—but, so far at least, Canadians haven’t been subjected to Bushfascism yet (any more than they had a Tail-Gunner Joe or a HUAC).  Maybe they see it as a warning not to follow too closely in our path.  Or maybe they see it as an indictment of the big bully to the south.  I can say, though, that in performance they didn’t soft-pedal the message or mute the play’s voice.  Director Bradecki (a 51-year-old Pole, which may have made his take on this drama more perceptive) staged a full-voiced production, especially the actor who played John Proctor, Benedict Campbell, who was excellent.  He gave full, unapologetic rein to Proctor’s stiff-backed pride, his anguish, his guilt, and his horror at what he sees happening to him and his neighbors even as he tries to stop it.  His final resignation—to die rather than swear to a lie to save his life, to put his precious name on a false confession—in the presence of his pregnant wife (who would live for at least another year without him if he doesn’t confess) was easily one of the most dramatic moments in the festival. 

[Some have pointed out that the putative parallel between the actual witch hunts of the 17th century and the red hunts of the 1950s is invalid because, as Molly (Day Thatcher) Kazan, Elia Kazan’s wife, told Miller, there never really were any witches, but there were communists (including in the entertainment business: Miller himself had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1940s).  Though this is undeniably true—witches are imaginary; communists are real—parallels still pertained.  The fear and paranoia engendered by both was equally real and both were demonized by the established authorities of their respective societies.  The communal hysteria generated by rumors of witches in Salem was almost exactly duplicated by the rabid anti-communists of the McCarthy era and though execution was not an end result in the commie witch hunt as it had been for the actual witch trials of the 1690s, many careers and lives were utterly destroyed as a result of the hearings, trials, and denunciations by such publications as Red Channels.  Furthermore, the potential dangers attributed to both witches and communists in the entertainment industry (I’m not referring to actual spies like the Rosenbergs), were equally specious.  Miller himself pointed out that while we know today that there are no such things as witches (I’m not talking about modern-day Wiccans), to deny their existence in Salem 325 years ago was ill-advised and doing so could put a settler’s life in jeopardy since it was the colony authorities (the colonial equivalent to the state or, in the case of HUAC, our federal government) which determined what’s real and what’s a myth.  In the 17th century, witches and witchcraft were as real as communists and communism was in the 20th; in 17th-century England, there was even a man, Matthew Hopkins, who assumed the self-appointed position of Witchfinder General.]

'Incident at Vichy'

[I had a serious computer malfunction just as I was starting to compose this report on Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy.  It resulted in an extensive delay and I had to shuffle the line-up on Rick On Theater and push this play report and the one to follow back more than a week.  I apologize to ROT readers and I hope you all derive some benefit from the belated reports anyway.  Incident is still running, but only for a few more days, but Naomi Wallace’s Night is a Room will have closed by the time I get that report posted.  It’s always my intention to get my performance reports on line while the shows are still in theaters, but circumstances have thwarted me this time.  Stuff happens.  ~Rick]

My usual theater companion, Diana, and I met at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row Saturday night, 21 November, to see the current revival of Arthur Miller’s 1964 World War II drama Incident at Vichy.  Incident’s not a frequently-mounted play, partly because of its large cast (17 men at Signature, 21 in the original) and partly because it’s a very talky play with many earnest monologues and stichomythic passages about politics, psychology, philosophy, and morality.  I think the play’s largely overlooked today, however, because Miller’s subject—the arrest and internment of Jews and other disenfranchised peoples in Third Reich territories—is seen as old news now, 70 years after World War II ended.  So, why revive this play, and why now?  Does it have anything to say to us today?  Was Miller, a fierce defender of freedom of speech and expression, freedom of belief, and civil and human rights, writing about something more lasting, more continuous, than the lethal anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their French collaborators?  Signature is presenting an Arthur Miller play this season as part of its recognition of the playwright’s centennial, but is Incident at Vichy still relevant?

While Incident retains its structural and dramaturgical problems—it is talky (Miller added a mass escape attempt for the 1966 London version which I suspect was an effort to insert some physical action)—and Miller, who covered some war-crimes trials for the Herald Tribune, used the play as a soapbox for his thoughts on all kinds of questions that were pertinent in the aftermath of Adolf Eichmann’s trial and execution in Israel for crimes against humanity (1961 and 1962, respectively) and John Kennedy’s assassination (Incident opened almost exactly a year after the president’s death) and on the eve of all-out war in Southeast Asia (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by congress four months before the play débuted).  Civil unrest was about to burst forth in America, the far-right John Birch Society and the racist Ku Klux Klan were on the rise, and violence against war protesters and another population of disenfranchised people was increasing.  (Miller even has one of his characters state baldly that “every nation has condemned somebody because of his race, including the Americans and what they do to Negroes”—a bold indictment in 1942, perhaps, but not in 1964.)  The Cold War was heating up (the Cuban Missile Crisis had only occurred a little over two years earlier) and it looked like the ground was being laid for a redux of the repression and authoritarianism of the 1930s and ’40s.  Given Miller’s predilections, a play warning us that the recent past might predict a potential future if we don’t heed the signs and the dangers was perfectly understandable.  Indeed, in his review of the première of Incident at Vichy, New York Times reviewer Howard Taubman declared, “Arthur Miller has written a moving play, a searching play, one of the most important plays of our time.” 

I know that sounds a little (okay, a lot) hyperbolic 50 years on, but Incident’s not so dated as some detractors insist.  It’s a history play—it was even when Miller wrote it (much like his Crucible)—and as such, it has things to say to us in 2015 just as it did to the première-goers in 1964.  It wasn’t that long ago that we in this beacon of democracy rounded up hundreds of “unlawful combatants” and locked them away for years at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial (isn’t that the definition of a concentration camp?), sent some accused terrorists into “extraordinary rendition” in countries that routinely practice torture, and used “enhanced interrogation” techniques on prisoners in this very country.  Didn’t we pass a Patriot Act that authorizes warrantless government intrusion into some of our most private transactions?  And didn’t congress and the president empower the NSA to gather immense amounts of our personal data secretly and without a warrant?  Speaking of warrants, don’t we have a secret court that issues them for clandestine electronic eavesdropping (and has never denied an application)? 

Just this month, a leading candidate for the U.S. presidential nomination proposed closing our borders to all Muslims, while another announced that a Muslim should never be President of the United States.  Several candidates have called for a religious test for refugees and asylum-seekers from Syria and Iraq, screening out the Muslims; at least one politician proposed allowing only Christians in.  That comes mighty close to the Nazis’ exclusionary race laws.  Since these ideas have been greeted with considerable approval by some voters, it could sure look like we’re on the road to totalitarianism.  (I confess, ever since the department was established, I’ve always been uneasy with how close the name Homeland Security is to the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—Ministry for State Security, the notorious Stasi—and the Soviet KGB—Komityet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, Committee for State Security.) 

So why this play and why now, as dramaturgs are trained to ask.  In addition to Miller’s 100th birthday, all the circumstances I noted are abroad in the land right now.  Incident at Vichy recounts a (fictional) 1942  round-up in the capital of Unoccupied France of suspected people ostensibly to have their identity papers checked.  The full horror of the Nazi deportations and executions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, communists and socialists, and the mentally and physically handicapped had not yet been exposed to the world.  Nether had the extent of the willful collaboration by the Vichy French, which had its own concentration camps where deportees were held until shipped east  to places like Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and Dachau.  Those in danger who’d heard the rumors didn’t believe them.  Few ordinary Germans or French who weren’t among the suspect peoples took any action or raised a protest; some even willingly participated.  Only one or two of Miller’s characters in Incident suspect that anything more than what they’d been told—that their papers were being checked—was about to happen.  This is analogous to the situation in which we now find ourselves.  Most Americans (though the number is dwindling) refuse to believe that Donald Trump will be nominated for president, or that if he is, he can win the office.  In spite of the acclaim received by proposals to shut the country’s doors to one religious group, most American pundits don’t think such an act can happen.  Even though President Obama moved to close Guantanamo Bay prison camp, states across the country and legislators in congress moved to prevent it.  Hatred and fear of Muslims (and anybody that looks like them) is widespread and has led to violence.  The target in Incident may be Jews for the most part (one man’s a Gypsy and another’s a Marxist), but we’ve seen the population of the despised group shift from era to era, and right now it’s Muslims, so the play’s fundamental point is not just still valid, but current.  (“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew; / Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.”)

Miller (1915-2005) was the writer-in-residence at the Signature Theatre Company for its 1997-98 season (The American Clock, 1980; The Last Yankee, 1991; I Can’t Remember Anything, 1987; The Pussycat & the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man, radio play – 1941; Mr. Peter’s Connections, world première – 1998). STC’s revival of Incident began previews on the Irene Diamond Stage on 27 October under the direction of Michael Wilson (Orphans’ Home Cycle; see my report on 25 and 28 February 2010).  The production opened on 15 November and is scheduled to close on 20 December (extended twice from 6 December).  It’s a 90-minute, one-act play about ten men detained by German officers and French police in 1942.  After being picked up on the streets of Vichy, France, the capital of the Unoccupied Zone, six men and a teenaged boy wait in a detainment center, wondering why they’ve been detained.  (After France was defeated by the German army in 1940, the Nazis let a carefully overseen puppet regime administer southern France, known officially as the French State, while Germany occupied and directly ruled Paris and the north.  In 1942, however, after the Allied invasion of largely Vichy-controlled North Africa, Germany began taking a more direct role in administering Unoccupied France and enforcing its race laws.)  None of the men have been told why they were brought in to this makeshift detainment center, but it’s clear most of them are Jewish. 

The men begin to act out of panic and fear; they remain aloof from one another at first, not wanting to take a chance one of them might be an informer or, just as bad for the rest, an actual criminal who could pull them down with him.  Neither the German officers nor the French police say anything to the detainees.  Bayard (Alex Morf) tries to convince the excitable Lebeau (Jonny Orsini), an artist, to calm down while Marchand (John Procaccino), a self-important businessman, and Monceau (Derek Smith), an actor, insist this is a routine identity check.  Still, Lebeau is convinced the Germans will kill them.  The French Police Captain (AJ Cedeño); Professor Hoffman (Brian Cross), a Nazi scholar of “racial anthropology”—he apparently goes about measuring the noses of captives—from the Race Institute; and two detectives (Alec Shaw, Curtis Billings) enter with the Old Jew (Jonathan Hadary), Leduc (Darren Pettie), a psychoanalyst, and Von Berg (Richard Thomas).  (None of the characters, except Von Berg and Ferrand, the café owner, is ever referred to by name in the play.)  

Little by little, the prisoners begin to talk and hypothesize among themselves, and a little cohesion starts to generate.  It’s not actual solidarity yet; each man is still leery of the others and focusing in his own circumstance.  Marchand is ushered into the off-stage office and returns with a pass to leave.  Meanwhile, Bayard, a railroad electrician, tells the others about Jews being transported by railroad car to concentration camps in Poland where they’re worked to death.  (Though Vichy France had its own “detention camps,” among them Camp Drancy, Camp de Rivesaltes, Camp Gurs, and Camp Vernet, few people knew what awaited the “undesirables” who’d been rounded up and incarcerated there.  Rumors, however, were beginning to spread.)  Monceau argues that the Germans wouldn’t senselessly kill the Jews since audiences applauded his performances so much when he played in Germany, but Von Berg, an Austrian prince, insists that many of the Germans were once cultivated people but that Nazism has coarsened them.  Monceau insists they’ll be fine as long as their papers are in order and the others anxiously examine their documents.  It’s very Kafkaesque and frightening—especially since we know what they barely suspect.  The Marxist Bayard gets irritated by Lebeau’s frenzy and insists that they can’t react personally to this situation because they’re a part of history. 

Café-owner Ferrand (Demosthenes Chrysan) brings coffee to the officers, and as he leaves, he tells the waiter (David Abeles), his employee, that he overheard the detectives talk of burning people in furnaces.  In response, Leduc, formerly a French army officer, suggests that three men could overpower the guard (Quinlan Corbett) at the door, but no one’s willing to join him; compliance with the authorities offers a chance of release while rebellion seems to ensure death.  Meanwhile, the Gypsy (Evan Zes) and Bayard are both interrogated, but neither returns.  Monceau refuses to believe that the Germans are burning Jews in furnaces, but Von Berg and Leduc both believe that man is truly that atrocious.  When the waiter’s turn comes, he tries to run away and must be thrown into the office.  The Wehrmacht Major (James Carpinello), a regular army officer wounded in combat, argues with the Professor about their interrogation methods.   Feeling this duty is beneath him and that this kind of assignment should be left to the SS, the Major takes a walk during which questioning is suspended.  The boy (Jonathan Gordon) offers to help Leduc in his escape attempt, but Leduc believes it’s fruitless without the aid of Monceau, the only other able-bodied man; but the actor still insists the Germans are incapable of mass exterminations, showing how the Nazis could perpetrate the Holocaust for so long, protected by denial and complicity.  Leduc and Monceau argue about racial laws and Von Berg tells about the Jewish musicians that were killed in Austria—the Nazi officer in charge of the detail had waited to listen to the rehearsal before taking the musicians away—as proof that the Germans would indeed endeavor to exterminate the Jews.

Accepting his fate, the boy asks Von Berg, whom they all expect to be released, to return his mother’s wedding ring which he was trying to pawn for food when he was arrested.  As Leduc and the boy decide to escape, the Major returns, intoxicated, and advises them against the action.  The Major and Leduc argue because Leduc wants the Major to help them escape, but the Major insists it will not matter as he sees a future where human beings are insignificant.  Lebeau, Monceau, and the boy are each questioned one by one, and none of them returns.  When the Old Jew ignores his summons to the interrogation room, the Police Captain drags him into the office by his arms and beats him.  During this, Leduc asks Von Berg to tell his wife about his arrest, and the prince asks that they part as friends; Leduc, however, refuses until Von Berg accepts that he’s partly complicit in the Nazi horrors because he’s done nothing to change things.  The Professor interrogates Von Berg, releasing him with a pass which Von Berg gives to Leduc, now the only one of the original 10 left, and insists the psychoanalyst flee.  Even though it’s an empty gesture since he will soon be recaptured (and Von Berg will certainly be punished as well), Leduc goes.  The Professor, the Captain, and the detectives rush out of the office to find Leduc gone and Von Berg alone in the detention room; the Major and Von Berg stare at each other without comprehension.

Miller asserted that he wrote Incident at Vichy to examine “the anomie and paralysis before the knowledge of mass destruction,” which apparently he was convinced were once again on the horizon because “the same questions haunt us” when he turned to the play as were present during the war and the Holocaust.  I imagine the playwright would say they’re abroad again in our own time.  According to the Signature’s own publicity, the play reveals “a shared humanity . . . through debate, dissent, and compassion.”  Nonetheless, Incident played only 99 performances (some reports say only 32) after it opened at Greenwich Village’s ANTA Washington Square Theatre on 3 December 1964.  The production (part of a repertory that also included Miller’s After The Fall, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, and Molière’s Tartuffe), directed by Harold Clurman, was mounted by the newly formed Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center.  (Hal Holbrook played the Wehrmacht Major, David Wayne portrayed Von Berg, and Joseph Wiseman was Leduc; Pierre Epstein and Tony Lo Bianco played unidentified prisoners, roles that were omitted in the STC revival.  The set was by the great Boris Aronson.)  It was neither a critical nor box-office success.  A London production, starring Alec Guinness as Von Berg, Anthony Quayle as Leduc, and Nigel Davenport as Monceau, played at the Phoenix Theatre in 1966 and Miller adapted his script for a TV broadcast on PBS directed by Stacy Keach and starring Andrew Robinson (the Major), Burt Freed (Marchand), Harris Yulin (Leduc), Richard Jordan (Von Berg), and René Auberjonois (Monceau) in 1973.  The only other professional New York City staging was in March-April 2009 by the Off-Broadway group The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) at the Samuel Beckett Theatre on Theatre Row. 

Dramatically and thematically, Miller’s Incident at Vichy isn’t about the fate of the prisoners; we already know, as did the original audiences in the ’60s, what happens to them sooner or later.  (Even if some of the men manage to escape the detention room, they’ll most likely be caught, as Von Berg points out, and even if some do get to safety, many others just like them will be transported to concentration and death camps over the ensuing three years of the Third Reich.)  What Miller’s exploring, of course, is how these ten men of varying backgrounds, ages, and philosophies respond to their circumstances and one another—and what we can learn from observing them do so.  It’s interesting to note that in Miller’s original stage directions, the detainees are all sitting in line on the same bench when the scene opens.  (Clurman, in his director’s notes, describes the opening tableau as “one in which the characters remain immobile—arrayed as if in a ‘memorial tablet’ or ‘frieze’ in commemoration of the dead.”)  Michael Wilson has them all separated in different chairs, stools, and bits of floor, scattered haphazardly around the room.  Clurman’s staging emphasized the commonality of the group, even though they don’t acknowledge it yet, showing that they’re all in the same boat and, since they were almost certainly ordered to sit that way, under the thumb of the German authorities and their Vichy police collaborators.  In Wilson’s view, however, this is a random assortment of individuals who seem to have nothing in common and, what’s more, are wary of each other.  Though both attitudes change as the play develops, I think the separate-coming-together (out of many, one?) makes the stronger and more appropriate point, especially for the world as it is in 2015. 

The set, designed by Jeff Cowe and lit by David Lander, is an obviously disused building that might have been a warehouse with scattered debris, discarded papers, and decrepit bits of furniture strewn about.  It’s a gray plaster-and-metal basement room as the window are high up the walls and, later, we see the wheels and undercarriages of trucks dispatched to search for Leduc.  (The projection on the newspaper-covered windows is by Rocco DiSanti.) The office and interrogation rooms are stage left (all we see when the door opens to let someone out or usher someone in is a tiny glimpse of a document-strewn desk and back wall) and the barred gate from the outside, presumably a below-grade passage from the street, is up right.  The sentry is out of sight, presumably at the top of the stairs leading from the passageway up to the street to guard the entrance to the detention center.  It’s suitably grim and spiritless, like a mid-20th-century dungeon.  Cowe’s design effectively interprets Clurman’s description: “Something hard, mysterious, ‘Kafka-like’ . . . .  A ‘no-man’s land enclosure.”  (Miller’s first idea for the setting, according to Clurman, was a police station, but he changed the designation to the current, ambiguous “a place of detention.”)  Kafka’s an apt image for the beginning of Incident, but I don’t think it would be too great a stretch to perceive in this room an evocation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s setting for No Exit, his play about hell.  There are, in fact, parallels in the themes of Kafka’s expressionistic The Trial, Sartre’s existential No Exit, and Miller’s naturalistic Incident at Vichy.  I’d even suggest there’s a little of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—which had opened in London and the U.S., turning the theater world on its ear, less than 10 years before Incident premièred on Broadway—embedded in Incident. 

Among other implied references in Incident are intimations of social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment on obedience to authority figures at Yale in 1961 and political theorist Hannah Arendt’s reporting of the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker as compiled in 1963’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  I believe it’s all these references that keep Incident at Vichy relevant and compelling so many decades after the actual history on which the play’s based (just the way that The Crucible remains relevant today even though it was written in response to the McCarthyite commie hunts of the 1950s).  Milgram’s proof that even average and fundamentally ethical people can be persuaded to commit torture under the cover of authority and Arendt’s revelation that evil was as banal as self-interest, however benighted, and that under the right circumstances, anyone might  perpetrate horrendous acts.  Kafka famously depicted a prisoner facing trial for an unknown crime under circumstances he doesn’t know; Sartre portrayed hell as a collection of ordinary people who haven’t taken responsibility for their behavior; in Godot, Beckett looks at what people do when they’re waiting for something unknown to happen and facing the dilemma of not knowing the best action to take.  Miller’s characters exhibit various incarnations of these same issues—and we continue to face them today, as Miller himself observed when he wrote the play.

The performances are uniformly fine, with several standouts among the cast.  Like other shows on which I’ve reported recently, Incident is an ensemble work; all the characters, especially the 10 detainees, must form a universe together in which they all exist and play their parts, and director Wilson guided his company to this achievement thoroughly.  But while this isn’t a star vehicle, several performances are notable principally because the roles are pivotal.  At the center of the drama are Darren Pettie’s psychoanalyst, Leduc, and Richard Thomas’s Austrian aristocrat, Von Berg.  They are the intellectuals of the group, the thinkers and reasoners, and their debate about the nature of Man and his ability to do evil is the main point of Miller’s play.  (This is where Arendt’s idea is most prominently visible.)  Pettie is logical but at the same time passionate about his understanding of the Nazis and what they’re capable of and because he’s certain that all the prisoners’ fates will be imprisonment or worse, they must fight and resist.  But Thomas’s Von Berg, who manages to be refined and even genteel without being prissy, still offers a rational rebuttal to Leduc’s more muscular arguments.  The men learn something from each other, and in the end, it is they who take some action, even if it’s only symbolic.

Monceau, the actor, represents the willfully blind, the Jews who wouldn’t see what was happening around them until it was too late.  Derek Smith makes him both foolish and sympathetic at once—a fool because he won’t recognize what’s before his eyes and a sympathetic figure because he’s so absolutely sincere in his belief that no people who love music and art as much as the Germans do could commit atrocities.  (This is where Milgram comes into play.)  Smith, on whom I recently reported in “Desire,” last 26 September, and earlier in “Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2011),” 19 January 2012, manages to thread his way between the two aspects of his character without becoming a buffoon or a figure of ridicule.  As the Major, James Carpinello reveals both his fundamental humanity, which we see being subdued by his fealty to the world in which he finds himself (here both Milgram and Arendt operate) and his frustration, even anger, at being forced into the position of having to carry out such duties.  Other effective turns are provided by Jonny Orsini as the painter, Lebeau, whose agitation is the catalyst that gets the prisoners to examine their fate and their options; Jonathan Gordon’s Boy, whose poignant pleas for someone to get word to his mother what has happened to him and his willingness to back Leduc’s escape play are the most touching moments of the production.  I should also add a word about Jonathan Hadary as the Old Jew: he speaks almost not a word—among the hardest things for an actor to do—except a Hebrew prayer when he’s called in for interrogation and yet expresses bottomless endurance and resignation.  He dresses in a fur hat and a long, black coat and wears a full beard (the costumes, all in a subdued palette so as not to enliven the grim cell, are by David C. Woolard) so that he could be taken for no one but a Jew, causing one of the others to remark that he was just asking to be picked up.  In a way, he represents the “Other,” all those peoples who’ve been the targets of “ethnic cleansing” by any regime at any time in history—including our own.  “Each man has his Jew,” declares Leduc, not exempting the Jews themselves; “the black, the yellow, the white, it is the other.”

I don’t know if there’s a cut-back on theater coverage in New York City, the nation’s theater capital, but it seems that several regular outlets declined to cover Incident at Vichy.  Dailies for which I couldn’t find reviews on line included the Daily News and the New York Post, and weeklies the Village Voice and Variety.  Linda Winer called the STC revival, “one of the few rarities in our unofficial Miller centennial year,” a “thoughtful, straightforward, perhaps unavoidably heavyhanded production” in Long Island’s Newsday.  Those “yearning for a bolt of moral certitude,” Winer asserted, will find in Incident “an honorable place to start,” for although “Miller’s answer here may strain credibility,” the Newsday reviewer felt, “he certainly asked the right questions.”  In amNewYork, Matt Windman described the show as “a superb, highly compelling revival,” even though he found that a “great chunk of the dialogue resembles a long-winded treatise on psychology and ethics.”  “Nevertheless,” added Windman, “the play is suspenseful throughout” due to its “excellent ensemble cast.”  “‘Incident at Vichy’ . . . is a creakily earnest one-act play,” asserted Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal, in which the characters “make speeches, some of them craven, others noble, and all written in the well-known Miller manner.”  Director Wilson, though, “ratchets up the dramatic tension much higher than you’d think it could possibly go, and his ensemble cast is superior,” reported the WSJ review-writer.  (Like most of his colleagues in the press, Teachout singled out Richard Thomas for special praise.)  In the end, however, said Teachout, “Miller undercuts their effect, such as it is, with a speciously uplifting denouement that fails to convince.”    

Christopher Isherwood of the New York Times wrote that “it would be nice to report that ‘Incident at Vichy’ . . . still might be regarded in [a] shining light,” but lamented that “the respectable if sometimes stolid revival . . . reveals, the passing of the decades has perhaps inevitably dimmed the play’s power.”  Isherwood explained:

What’s appealing about this rare chance to see “Incident at Vichy” is the opportunity that it affords to hear Miller’s ethical insights and piercing intelligence resounding with such unbridled forthright eloquence.  What’s less appealing?  Well, all that resounding eloquence.

The characters, the Timesman complained, “seem like ambulatory megaphones for one point of view or another.”  The reviewer, who objected to presenting the play on the large Irene Diamond stage instead of a smaller, “more oppressive” space, reported that “eventually . . . the play sometimes sags with wordy, articulate debates.”  Incident, Isherwood observed, “tends to billboard its moral arguments.” 

The New York Jewish press had its say as well.  In the Jewish Week, Ted Merwin noted that Miller “rarely dealt as explicitly with the world’s collective responsibility for the Jews of Europe as in his 1964 one-act play.”  Wilson’s revival, Merwin stated, “aims to banish [the] perception [that Incident is a minor Miller play] . . . and . . . deserves to take its place in the canon of major Miller works.”  The JW journalist quoted director Wilson’s description of the play as a “serious thriller” and a “spine-tingling and suspenseful” evening of theater and reported, “Two Jewish couples who attended a recent preview told him that the play had ‘ripped through them—their whole bodies were shaking at the end.’”  “The trouble with a play like Arthur Miller’s ‘An Incident at Vichy,’” wrote Forward culture reporter Anna Katsnelson, “is the ubiquitous presence of Holocaust narrative” in our popular culture.  Describing the STC revival of Incident as a “talky, fast-moving production,” Katsnelson asserted that it’s a worthy addition because it adds to our understanding of what Michael Wilson dubbed “arguably the greatest atrocity ever to unfold in the history of our civilization.”  “It will inject you with a high dose of dramatic adrenaline, and make a great feast of ideas for your après-theater discussion,” she predicted.  Katsnelson further observed that “the events portrayed in it might seem absurd, but the drama is all too real.”  Noting that the “hero” of Incident is not one of Miller’s Jewish captives but the Austrian blue-blood, the Forward reviewer concluded, “The play’s universalist message remains as relevant as ever—Miller suggests that heroes, victims, and oppressors can be found in members of all nationalities.”

“In Incident at Vichy,” wrote Jesse Green in New York magazine, “. . . the ideas—about complicity in evil, aesthetics vs. politics, and the limits of solidarity—get loose from the form, a problem the worthy revival now playing at the Signature Theatre unfortunately exacerbates.”  Green added:

Miller’s urgency to preach busts through the limitations of the premise and emerges in full but nontheatrical glory.  The remaining characters (with one exception) speak more and more like pamphlets, and, until that trick ending, the play as a play seems to slink away in chagrin.

“But this is Arthur Miller,” the New York reviewer acknowledged, “so the pamphleteering is beautifully done.”  Green even allows that the play might be “gripping, under the right circumstances,” though he felt that the STC production “only reaches that level a few times . . . .”  Green thought that distributing the captives randomly around the stage was a mistake and he also found the acting lacked the specificity “to suggest complete histories, even where Miller doesn’t provide much opportunity.”  The one exception is Jonathan Hadary as the Old Jew, who “encapsulates a whole lifetime” even though he practically never says a word.  In conclusion, Green proclaimed, “To say that Incident at Vichy is not a perfect play (or that this production is not ideal) is not too much of a criticism.  After all, he meant it less as an aesthetic object than as an alarm, two decades after liberation of the camps, that the world had changed irrevocably.”  In the New Yorker, Hilton Als is of a similar opinion, writing, “Miller saw the world in a grid: good was good, bad was bad, and the gray areas of existence were either unexplored in his work or handled clumsily.  This weakness is especially clear in ‘Incident at Vichy.’”  He had good words to say, however, about the actors’ work.

The entertainment press were of mixed opinions.  In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman deemed that Michael Wilson “directed somberly,” helping to “illustrate why” Incident, “though sometimes stirring,” is rarely staged.  What Feldman thought has “aged least well about” the play is the dialogue which, he reported, “often sounds like an essay or a lecture”—“it sounds like a playwright writing something other than a play.”  Overall, though, Feldman judged, “Incident at Vichy gives an airing to still-timely concerns.”  The man from TONY declared, “To modern Americans grappling with questions of privilege and responsibility, in relation to disadvantaged groups in America or abroad, the play remains a thrown gauntlet.”  The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck asserted, “Incident at Vichy reflects both Miller’s strengths and weaknesses”: it has “powerful themes . . ., tautly dramatized and well-defined.  But the play is also talky and didactic, its themes expressed too baldly.”  Nonetheless, Scheck found that the revival “has a gripping cumulative power that builds to a surprising conclusion, which is at once uplifting and tragic” due in part to Wilson’s “highly effective” directing and the ensemble, which “is mostly excellent” (despite a couple of questionable casting choices). 

The cyber press was out in full force this time (after some recent productions they seemed to have shunned).  On Broadway World, Michael Dale reported that Wilson directed “a fine and sensitively-acted production” of Incident  for STC on “an imposing” set by Cowe.  Dale concluded, “ It can be an uncomfortable play to watch, but it’s the discomfort that makes it good theatre.”   New York Theatre Guide’s Tulis McCall characterized the play as starting off as “a breathing organism of men on the edge of terror” and then “succumbs to a heavy handed presentation of what I believe was Miller’s deep dive into a contemporary abyss.”  Despite the horrifying circumstances, McCall found, “This cast, however, shows no real sign of fear.”  The NYTG writer went on to specify that “the cast has two jobs: to touch our hearts and feed our intellects,” and then explained:.

Because, however, they seem to have been guided into a no man’s land between these two fronts and told to stay put, they are hobbled.  They succeed [at] neither endeavor.  They end up stranded, neither here nor there.  As do we.  A disappointment indeed.

Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway reported that STC’s Incident is “a first-rate revival” of “the haunting universe of Arthur Miller’s” play.  Despite “an unremarkable premise and . . . a predetermined outcome,” Miller “unlocks no shortage of suspense and woe.”  Murray declared the script “intelligent playwriting that Wilson and a roundly capable, unglittering cast have treated with palpable care and affection.”  The TB reviewer admitted that “Miller allows himself a bit of moralizing, maybe even too much,” but “Wilson and his company navigate these [moments] well.”  His final assessment is: “Wilson's Incident at Vichy could scarcely feel more alive.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer dubbed the STC revival “s a high-tension 90 minutes” and “also one of the most satisfying and relevant dramas currently in any New York Theater.”  Praising Wilson’s direction, Sommer declared the cast “an extraordinarily effective ensemble”; “Director Wilson never lets the tension flag,” the CU review-writer reported, and her last word on the production was: “Don’t miss it.”  Calling the STC mounting “a lavish (if somewhat underwhelming) production” on TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart also attested that “ the visually striking results seem lacking in urgency.”  Stewart had difficulty with “Wilson's gorgeously rendered period production” because he felt it “seems too distant, too unique to cause 21st-century Americans to question the ways our lifestyles indirectly undergird oppression.”  He was ambivalent as to his overall judgment, affirming that on one hand, “While it occasionally feels like an essay repurposed as a drama . . ., this excellent cast breathes life into the author's extended musings . . . .” and then asserting, “Unfortunately, there is precious little sense of impending doom in this play.”  Suggesting that Incident may require “a pushier directorial voice,” Stewart deemed that “Wilson's faithful, by-the-book staging, however impressive, does little to offset the feeling that we're watching an elaborately decorated college seminar.”