Author Archives: Scott MacClelland

Arthur Miller’s The Price

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Victor Talmadge, Nancy Carlin and Rolph Saxon; photo by Steve DiBartolomeo

By Philip Pearce

THERE SEEMS TO BE an Arthur Miller Renaissance going on. Mike Nichols’ 2012 production of Death of a Salesman had New Yorkers fighting for tickets to watch the late Philip Seymour Hoffman play Willy Loman. Next month, Ivo Van Hove’s sensationally successful London New Vic version of A View from the Bridge hits Broadway, loaded down with British awards and justly hailed (I was lucky enough to catch the recent simulcast at the Lighthouse in Pacific Grove) as one of the great stage productions of this century.

By comparison with those two early masterworks, The Price, written 21 years after Salesman, is sometimes dismissed as interesting but second-class Miller. Audiences of the ‘60s, geared to the brisk visual impact and quick-action plotting of television drama, probably found Miller’s carefully detailed family saga a tad square and ponderous. It’s good that Santa Cruz’s resourceful Jewel Theatre Company is offering us a fresh look. Laid out moment by moment with the detailed precision of a chess game, the play text as interpreted in this lucid new production explodes into an ironic second act climax as penetrating and powerful as anything Miller ever wrote.It’s called The Price because it’s about evaluation, assessment, appraisal. Of things and the people who collect them.

A policeman named Victor Franz and his rich surgeon brother Walter meet in a New York attic littered with the furniture, utensils, recreational and artistic memorabilia of their past lives. It’s all been sitting up there, collecting dust and cobwebs, since their father died sixteen years ago. Faced with an unexpected demolition order on the family brownstone, the two men suddenly need a quick appraisal, a fair price and an instant sale before the bulldozers arrive.

Entering the theater, you face a set that seems like nothing so much as the reckless overflow of an out-of-control junk shop. But then the houselights dim and Victor Franz comes into focus and begins to lift dust cloths, open doors, exploring bureau drawers on items that will figure powerfully in what happens in the next two hours. He’s waiting for an 89-year-old antiques dealer named Gregory Solomon to come and do an appraisal and set a price. The process of assessing all this family stuff (treasures? junk?) becomes the visible framework on which Miller mounts, then peels away, a pattern of pretense and moral compromise that has concealed some pathetic and terrible secrets about both brothers. Director Joy Carlin wisely does not hurry Victor’s studied exploration of his family’s flotsam and jetsam. The program lists four actors. But the set itself is going to become a fifth.

The brothers are nicely contrasted. Victor Talmadge, playing his policeman namesake, seems sensitively uncomfortable in his cop’s pistol and uniform. When Walter, the socially superior brother he’s hardly spoken to for 16 years, shows up in the person of the exemplary Rolph Saxon, the newcomer’s outward social ease conceals an underlying push, salesmanship and commitment to action that suggest Saxon ought to be playing the cop and Talmadge the rich surgeon. But that, of course, is just the point.
Their sibling rivalry has flared up because the reflective Victor, against the grain of his innate sensitive idealism, gave up promising academic studies to walk the beat and pay the bills of a father traumatized by the 1929 crash. By contrast, the less gifted but more ambitious Walter has cut himself off from family ties and ruthlessly pursued a profitable one-man career in upscale surgery.

That’s the situation. Bravo sacrificial Victor. Shame on selfish Walter. Or so it seems. As Victor’s shrewd, ambitious wife Esther keeps reminding us, you can’t always believe what you see.

Talmadge skillfully plays the conflict in Victor between a desire to appease and accommodate (“I don’t know how to bargain!”) and a stiff morality which weighs up every option so carefully that he usually ends up choosing nothing. As Walter, Saxon is both dynamic and touchingly vulnerable. Watch the way he pauses to listen and absorb what other characters say. And notice how his lines are never words memorized from a manuscript but eruptions of discovery or bursts of fresh understanding dredged up from inside a real person. It’s a fine performance.

As Victor’s long-suffering wife, Nancy Carlin is in every way a match for the two men. She ably projects Esther’s understandable annoyance with her husband’s stubborn adherence to a lackluster, low-paying job which they both hate and his high-minded hesitation about whether to let Walter give him all the earnings of Solomon’s assessment. But Carlin never allows Esther’s frustration to turn her into a tiresome nag. She understands that Miller has set up powerful emotional battles but never takes sides. For all her domestic struggles she remains believable and appealing, a woman whose greatest strength emerges in those moments when, whatever the odds, it’s clear she deeply loves her husband.

In the pivotal role of the appraiser Solomon, Arje Shaw is a physically winsome comic old fellow, blessed with an generous range of facial expressions. But his line delivery is so brisk and full of quirky Yiddish energy that some of the texture and wisdom of what Solomon has to say gets lost in the breakneck pace with which Shaw says it. The old antiques dealer is more than just a pleasing piece of comic relief. For all his wry cajoling, Solomon provides an anchor of folk wisdom and reality to a story stalked by pretense and self-delusion. This deeper dimension of the character is not always clear in Shaw’s sprightly comic portrayal. Fortunately his performance mellows. As the play progresses he finds some welcome areas of pathos and reflection. The final moments of the action, with Solomon alone on stage at first convulsed with laughter and then stirred by doubts as he listens to a scratchy phonograph record, are touching and effective.

Miller’s script is grounded in the solid, old-fashioned and admirable belief that dramatic tension isn’t a matter of a lot of busy stage activity but of having to assess and reassess, decide and maybe re-decide again who everybody really is. Those discoveries, as the story enters its final hour, have the explosive force of plot revelations in a well written thriller. There’s a startling and unsuspected truth about Victor, for instance, that is all the more shocking for having been evident in plain view all evening as a piece of Ken Dorsey’s jigsaw of a stage set.

What that piece is you’ll only know if you make your way to Center Stage in Santa Cruz for this fine production of a great play.

It’s a worthy opener of Jewel’s new season but their last production in the current venue at 1001 Center Street. The season continues November 12 with Guys and Dolls, in the new Colligan Theater now under construction at the Tannery Arts Center.

Miriam Ellis

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By Scott MacClellandMusée d'Art moderne

SHE CALLS her project FIG, or alternately “Flexible Figaro.” Retired UC Santa Cruz humanities lecturer Miriam Ellis and retired UCSC music professor Sherwood Dudley have worked for several years on revising Lorenzo da Ponte’s Italian-language libretto for Mozart’s masterpiece, Le nozze di Figaro—The Marriage of Figaro. Ellis (seen visiting the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris) has taken the lead in translating between languages with the purpose of reconciling the opera libretto and the Beaumarchais play on which it is based, a work that in the opinion of many historians ignited the French Revolution of 1789. (Napoleon described it as “the revolution already in action.”)

Following historic precedent, in which Beaumarchais substituted spoken dialogue from his play for da Ponte’s recitatives at the Paris premiere of the opera, Ellis and Dudley provide producers with the choice of substituting spoken dialogue, taken from the play, for any of the sung numbers in the opera.

To recap the plot: Knowing that Figaro and Susanna are soon to be married, the master of the house, Count Almaviva, wants to revive the long-abolished ‘droit du seigneur’ by which medieval feudal lords gave themselves the ‘right’ to bed the brides of the servant class on their wedding nights. From the beginning, Figaro is determined to thwart the count’s repugnant presumption. In the original comedy, he paints the whole of the aristocracy with the same disdainful colors. “Figaro says about the count, you have this façade, this power, wealth, and what have you done to deserve it,” Ellis capsulates. “You merely took the trouble to be born. It was a tremendous put-down of the aristocracy.”

The play was very successful in Paris, and especially popular with the very aristocrats Beaumarchais lampoons, laughing at them while they laughed at the comedy. But da Ponte knew Figaro’s harangue would never get by the opera censors, so he recast the attack on the aristocracy as an attack on women, which bothered no one—except women. One woman in particular, Miriam Ellis, who, fired by her own robust feminism, refused to translate the words of that scene. “I’ll translate that sexist garbage, but only on one condition, and that’s if I can write alternative lyrics for the aria taken from Figaro’s speech.” When she hears baritones singing the scene from the da Ponte libretto, “It really galls me.”

The purpose of FIG is to provide new, revised translations of da Ponte’s texts and offer the choice of substitute spoken dialogue for them, in order to give opera companies more flexibility to make adjustments that suit their productions. “I was translating bits from the play putting them in the relevant places of da Ponte’s libretto, as spoken dialogue,” Ellis explains. Dudley’s role is to make sure the new translations fit the existing musical meters and to reproduce Mozart’s score and markings faithfully. “I’m the words, he’s the music.”

Ellis arrived at UCSC in 1971 to pursue her PhD studies. “I’m the woman who came to dinner,” she says, “because my son and daughter were accepted as students here.” It was an interim start-up, one quarter in the French Department. Ultimately she was rehired regularly until her retirement in 2004. “I taught French, theater and literature, and participated with Sherwood in establishing and teaching the opera workshop which is still going strong. I started doing French theater in 1972.” She found that workshopping Figaro “was too much for the students to master in ten weeks. So we did Act I with spoken dialogue to replace some of the recitatives.” This collaboration with Dudley started in the ‘80s. So far there have been “seven or eight” different versions of FIG. “In April the Shrewsbury [High] School in Shropshire, England, did a production. I’m waiting for the DVD of it.”

Ellis says their previous versions have been very successful, in workshops, small theaters and at universities. “Berkeley Opera did one and a Southern California little theater group did another. Each version has been a different take on it. It’s very adaptable.” She gives an example, “A singer who doesn’t have the tessitura to fit an aria can substitute dialog, then move on to the next piece.” The latest of many versions of the edited libretto is 571 pages and Ellis and Dudley are trying to figure out the best way to publish it.

Though Figaro may seem like an obsession to Ellis, her taste for opera is both broad and deep. In 1973-74 she did an opera program on the university’s radio station, KZSC. “In 1976, Sherwood and I staged [Donizetti’s] Don Pasquale, in English, at the woman’s club downtown, with costumes and sets, for four free performances. We had full houses and realized there was an interest in opera in this town.” So they founded SCOSI, Santa Cruz Opera Society Inc., which over the years has attracted many members from the community, both Town and Gown. “We have regular monthly meetings with programs presented by members. We sit around and watch, discuss and listen and when the music touches us we share our emotions openly,” adding. “When I hear the last scene from La bohème, I start to blubber.” John Dizikes, another UCSC faculty member and author of the well-known “Opera in America” is a member, but SCOSI is primarily a community group. “John and I did a class together on Romanticism for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. I did French, he did American.” Of SCOSI today, “Happily we’re getting a few youngsters, in their 60s,” she chuckles.