New Rep starts its new season with a tribute to Arthur
Miller, whose hundredth birthday is this year. BROKEN GLASS (playing through
Sept. 27th) is Miller’s strange, enigmatic play ostensibly about a
Jewish woman in New York
with hysterical paralysis. The title refers to Kristallnacht in 1938, when
Nazis in Germany
broke out every window they could find in Jewish stores and shops. Her legs
gave out from under her almost immediately upon hearing about events in Europe. (Most Americans at the time shared the opinion
that the National Party would not prevail.)
In CABARET, the charming green grocer reassures the landlady
he’s wooing that the Nazi threat will blow over. In BENT, the protagonist’s
uncle dismisses the trouble as “hooliganism.” Both characters’ grave
miscalculations wound us as we watch their stories unfold. It’s a brilliant
dramatic device to have us privy to information they don’t have. We despair for
them.
In Miller’s overlong, overloaded script, however, the Nazis
are discussed so much—or rather,
not discussed so often (Both her husband and her doctor, not to mention
relatives, tell the stricken woman not to obsess about them) that the shock
value is overwhelmed. You wouldn’t think it possible but the power to move us
is diluted perhaps because the play is clogged with ideas which don’t find
resolution: There’s the paralysis they all share: Bodily paralysis for the
wife; paralysis of the soul for the husband and paralysis of the mind for her
doctor.
And Miller piles on a bizarre sexual ambiguity for the lot of
them. The unorthodox, house calling, (actually bed calling) doctor seems to be
seducing his patient as some kind of therapeutic stratagem. (Even his wife is
suspicious.) The hyper-sexualized patient is definitely trying to seduce him.
The husband is hallucinating (or is he?) his own sexual experience. And just in
case we missed the first time, Miller keeps telling us that the wife has a
secret… maybe something evil. Maybe there’s a dybbuk but that intriguing
prospect goes nowhere.
Speaking of orthodoxy, Miller sets up an examination of
American Jewish identity as well. A few of his characters have had a better
time of it in his gifted, earlier plays. The husband (reminiscent of Willy Loman)
works for a gentile firm where he is the only Jewish employee and his tenuous
position depends on sales and mortgages. He has recently failed to deliver on a
sale and he fears there will be repercussions. Jeremiah Kissel plays him like
an excited time bomb, with every nerve in his body firing at once.
WWII is just around the corner but the family has no way of
knowing that, of course, which means their “brilliant” son, now making strides
at the military academy, most likely, as in ALL MY SONS, will be sent to the
front. Director Jim Petosa purposely (?) elicits arch, almost cinematic
performances from the cast, especially from Anne Gottlieb, reminiscent of one
of those seductively crazy Hollywood heroines
just waiting to be saved (and you know all the men in the movie want to… and
they’ll trip over each other to do it.).
There she lies, with her arms yawningly outstretched in her
satin nightgown, in the middle of a huge bed center stage like Hedy Lamar,
ready for her doctor (Benjamin Evett as her very personal physician). Miller
may be trying to make a case for complicity in the Holocaust by dint of denial
(Certainly no one in the play pays attention to this Cassandra.) but I couldn’t
find a clear path in this maze.
