Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespearean Festival

The Price The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any pro- duction at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, publications manager and editor; Clare Campbell, graphic artist. Copyright © 2019, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org.

Cover Art for The Price by Cully Long. The Price Contents

Information on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 5 About the Playwrights 6

Scholarly Articles on the Play The Price: Making Unreliable Narrators of Us All 9

Utah Shakespearean Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis: The Price Faced with dealing with his parents’ remaining possessions now that they have passed away, Victor Franz and his wife Esther visit an old soon-to-be-demolished Brownstone attic full of furni- ture they must sell. While waiting for an antiques dealer to arrive, Victor and Esther discuss Victor’s indecision about retiring from the police force and his estranged relationship with his brother Walter, a doctor. Esther expresses her unresolved feelings about Walter’s choice to leave home when he was young and finish medical school while Victor had to drop out of college to help his father survive the Great Depression and the death of his mother. The brothers haven’t spoken to each other since their father’s death sixteen years earlier. Victor has recently reached out to Walter in order to split the money for the furniture, but Esther feels Victor should be entitled to all of it because of his sacrifice—that, and she wants money. Gregory Solomon, the antiques appraiser, finally arrives and Esther leaves to run an errand. Solomon and Victor engage in small talk about the furniture, but eventually Victor is annoyed by Solomon’s run-around over naming a price. At last he offers an amount and Victor accepts it—just as Walter walks in. Walter doesn’t want to butt in on the deal, but feels they should get more once he hears how much Victor and Solomon have agreed upon. He is not interested in claiming his half, though, and he even proposes a way for Victor to get more. Esther agrees that Walter’s suggestion is better, and Victor starts to feel undermined and humiliated and doesn’t trust his brother’s honest intentions; and it soon becomes obvious that the brothers are dealing with more than the price of the furniture.

4 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters: The Price Victor Franz: Almost fifty years old, Victor is a police sergeant who is approaching retirement. Esther Franz: Victor’s wife, Esther is disappointed in their position at this stage of her life. Richard Burbage: A seasoned lion of the stage, loud and proud, Richard is in his fifties and famous across England. Gregory Solomon: A wily, elderly antiques dealer, Gregory is hired to appraise the remainder of Victor and Walter’s father’s possessions. Walter Franz: Victor’s estranged brother, Walter is a doctor who he hasn’t spoken to Victor in years.

Utah Shakespearean Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 About the Playwright: The Price By Lisa Larson Poignant. Thought-provoking. Timelessly relevant. Such superlatives could be used to describe many of playwright Arthur Miller’s theatrical contributions, as those privileged to see this summer’s Utah Shakespeare Festival production of The Price will surely surmise. Emerging as a playwright from the backdrop of the Great Depression and World War II, it’s little wonder Miller chose themes highlighting the plight of the white working class as the underlying message in so many of his works. In his own words Miller said, “I reflect what my heart tells me from the society around me,” according to the Arthur Miller Biography on the Chicago Public Library web site (https://www. chipublib.org/Arthur-miller-biography). Yet his observations and his eloquent com- mentary on society of the early to mid-1900s are still relevant today. Born in New York City in 1915 to a Jewish immigrant father and a New York- native mother, Miller spent his early years witnessing the success of his father’s gar- ment manufacturing business. Then, in 1928 the family moved to Brooklyn as his father’s business began to fail, a microcosm of the societal decay brought on by the Great Depression. Witnessing this devastation seemed to fuel Miller’s disillusionment with the American dream. He worked to earn tuition to attend the University of Michigan, where in the 1930s he began writing his own plays. He even won the prestigious Hopwood Award from the university for two consecutive years: for No Villian (which was not produced again for eighty years) and for Honors at Dawn (which also saw little success). His first plays after attending the university were also not successful. He, like many other playwrights, stumbled through some difficult times. His Broadway debut, The Man Who Had All the Luck lasted only four performances and was considered a flop. He followed up by publishing two books, Situation Normal in 1944 and Focus in 1945, and continued to write plays and radio plays. When Miller’s early plays were rejected by producers, Miller , now married to his college sweetheart Mary Slattery, went to work for Brooklyn Navy Yard and also wrote radio scripts to support his family. Then, in 1947, his piece All My Sons became a Broadway hit and edged him toward star status. Close on the heels of All My Sons and its 328 performance run, Miller again captivated audiences with Death of a Salesman in 1949. Known for its controversial themes and what some called “anti-American” sentiments, Death of a Salesman ran for 742 performances and won the Tony Award for best play, the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The play opened the eyes of many across the world to the basics of capitalism and lead character Willy Loman’s desire to “drink from the Grail of the American Dream.” For Miller, according to his biography on IMDB.com (https://www.imdb.com/

6 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 name/nm0007186/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm), this dream is the desire to “excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved and above all, per- haps to count.” The third of Miller’s major plays emerged in 1953 when Miller, overwhelmed by post-war paranoia and intolerance, penned The Crucible. Set in Salem dur- ing the witch-hunts of the late 1800s, The Crucible is ostensibly an indictment of McCarthyism of the early 1950s, according to PBS.org American Masters. The themes force audiences to contend with “extraordinary tragedy in ordinary lives.” No effort to recount the life and influence of Arthur Miller would be complete without his experience with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). According to an article by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker in March 2018, Miller was called to testify before Congress — and was ultimately found guilty of contempt for refusing to name the names of people he had seen at meetings of the Communist Party. The trouble started when a friend and colleague of Miller’s by the name of Elia Kazan appeared before this congressional committee and named members of the Group Theatre, who had been members of the Communist Party, according to the PBS American Masters feature essay on Elia Kazan. Later, Kazan and Miller spoke about Kazan’s experience just before Miller left for Salem, Massachusetts to research the 1692 witch trials for The Crucible. In their conversations, Miller drew several par- allels between the investigations by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the HUAC and the Salem witch trials. It wasn’t long after The Crucible opened that HUAC took an interest in Miller and he was called to testify. His conviction of contempt of Congress was later reversed in 1958 according to Encyclopedia of World Biography. Despite the impact of his experience with HUAC, Miller’s theatrical success pro- pelled his career forward, even as his personal life floundered. In 1956 he divorced his wife and married one of Hollywood’s brightest starlets: Marilyn Monroe. He later reflected on the fact that this marriage was “doomed to fail” from the beginning because of Monroe’s “highly destructive” tendencies, according to Miller’s biography on IMDB.com and information from his 1989 autobiography, Timebends. Miller says he was in love and all his energy and attention was devoted to trying to help Monroe solve her problems. Ultimately, he did not succeed. The marriage ended in 1961 while filming The Misfits, an original script he wrote specifically for Monroe, according to the IMDB. com biography. Miller married again in 1962, this time to a photographer, Inge Morath. During their marriage they collaborated on several photojournalistic projects. At the same time, Miller’s interest and active role in various social and political issues continued.

Utah Shakespearean Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 And so did his work as a playwright and ultimately to the silver screen when he col- laborated on the 1996 film version of The Crucible. It was during his time of political activation that he penned the 1968 production, The Price. Playing in the 2019 season at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, The Price tells the story of Victor Franz who gave up going to college in order to support his father—one of many stories marking the casualties of the Great Depression. When Victor goes to clean out his parents’ Manhattan brownstone attic, he is faced with the aftermath of a decision he made years ago, as well as a rocky relationship with his estranged brother. In typical Miller style, The Price delves into the cost of one’s decisions and the impact of the circumstances of one’s birth, upbringing, relationships, and more. Despite reaching what some might consider his career peak in the 1950s and ’60s, Arthur Miller is recognized by many to be one of the most important figures in twen- tieth century American theatre, according to the Arthur Miller Biography from the Chicago Public Library website. His continued attention as a man unwilling to back away from controversial politi- cal and social issues earned him a name beyond the theatre. His achievements earned him many awards, including the George Foster Peabody Award in 1981, the John F. Kennedy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1984, the National Medal of Arts in 1993, the National Book Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, the Japan Art Association lifetime achievement award in 2001, and more. Miller died in 2005, leaving behind a body of work which reflects key aspects of society during his life, with themes that continue to impact people today.

8 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 The Price: Making Unreliable Narrators of Us All By Ryan D. Paul Hugh B. Brown once said, “Every man is a diary in which he writes one story while intending to write another. His humblest moment is when he compares the two.” In Arthur Miller’s play, The Price, produced this fall by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, we see that wrenching comparison played out. Throughout the play, memory serves as a vehicle to “twist or reveal the truth, making unreliable narrators of us all” (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-heaviness-of-memory- in-arthur-millers-the-price). The Price, set in a crumbling brownstone in New York City, centers around two brothers, Victor, a frustrated and disappointed policeman, and his older brother Walter, a successful surgeon. Both men have returned to their father’s home, sixteen years after his death to clear out the attic as the building is about to be demolished. Victor has brought his wife Esther and soon the appraiser, Solomon, will arrive to value the furniture. This environment, surround by the many reminders of their divergent paths, provides a very suitable setting for the many revelations that will soon follow. Both Victor and Walter are at a crucial stage in their lives as The Price begins. Victor “lacks the courage to retire because this means that he will be forced to acknowledge his failure to create anything worthwhile. . . . Likewise he lacks the will to start again—to change a destiny which he has already rationalized away. . . . Walter is in a similar position. Although successful he can find no purpose or meaning behind his frenzied pursuit of wealth and fame. His personal life is in ruins, his professional integrity compromised” (C. W. E. Bigsby, “What Price Arthur Miller? An Analysis of The Price,” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 16, no. 1, 1970, p. 16, www.jstor.org/stable/440786). However, Walter, after a significant breakdown has awoken to new possibilities in life and struggles to explain this to Victor as the play progresses. In The Price, “The two brothers represent profoundly different approaches to life—approaches which not only co- exist in the world but which constitute the basis of most individual lives. This is the significance of Walter’s remark that ‘we’re brothers. It was only two seemingly different roads out of the same trap. It’s almost as though . . . we’re like two halves of the same guy. As though we can’t quite move ahead—alone” (Bigsby, 22). At first glance, Victor, who gave up a career in science to support his parents during the Great Depression of the 1930s, seems a model of heroic selfless- ness, while his brother Walter, who fled (escaped) from the clutches of a domineering father might represent complete self-interest. However, in true Miller fashion, “Victor is revealed as a weak and irresolute individual, unwilling to concede responsibility for his own life and consciously avoiding painful realities by retreating into illusion. Walter, on the other hand, is a man who has gradually come to recognize the inconsequence of wealth and success and who now tries to pass his insight onto others. He recognizes the need to acknowledge the reality of human weakness and to accept responsibility for one’s own actions” (Bigsby, 22–23). Walter’s willingness to “recognize the inconsequence of wealth and success” can seem a bit dis- ingenuous. After all, it is easy to decry wealth and success when you already have enjoyed it. Esther, Victor’s wife, points out ““all these years we’ve been saying, once we get the pension we’re going to start to live . . . It’s like pushing against a door for twenty-five years and suddenly it opens . . . and we stand there . . . everything’s always temporary with us. It’s like we never were anything, we were always about-to-be” (Bigsby, 18). According to Director Kathleen F. Conlin “the cop’s wife sees their possibility of renewed vigor and chance for a successful middle-age solely dependent on the sale of

Utah Shakespearean Festival 9 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 the furniture. Money has come to matter. The appraiser is the non-family member whose ability to put a “price” on the furniture throws the entire evening into the explosion of recrimination. Whose memory is right? What stories have they told themselves? What is the truth? What is the price of success? Whose success? What is the value of the furniture? Its literal value? Its emotional value? In this pitched battle of family history, revelations emerge that cause characters and audience to ask “what price” and for how long do we live the fictions that we remain loyal to” (Director’s Notes, Utah Shakespeare Festival). Conlin is no stranger to Utah Shakespeare Festival audiences or stages. She served for twenty- two seasons as the Festival associate artistic director and casting director, as well as directing numerous plays, including King Lear, The Boy Friend, The Lion in Winter, The Cherry Orchard, Born Yesterday, The Tempest, and Tuesdays with Morrie. She is a much-honored director, theatre profes- sional, and university administrator and professor. She was recently honored as the Roe Green Guest Director for Kent State University with a production of You Can’t Take It with You (https:// www.bard.org/news/announcing-the-2019-directors). While The Price covers many of Miller’s usual themes, “the roiling relationship of fathers and sons, the issues of guilt, the desire for release, the desperation of families, and the pain of every- day lives where early decisions entrap one’s future” (Director’s Notes), and is certainly worthy of a production on those merits, for Conlin, there is more, “Why produce the play fifty-one years after its Broadway premiere? Why do it at the Festival? Why bother? My take is that this play addresses audiences’ deep desire for stories—stories about ‘real’ people trying to make sense of life and the repercussions of their lifelong decisions. . . . Those of us in middle age who have reckoned with the tumultuous emotional ‘price’ we pay when ‘clearing out the attic of the family home’ know that the past is always with us. Miller helps us understand that when we try to honestly look back on our lives, we often scream as Victor does: “I don’t know what I knew” (emphasis by the author). Purging that guilt and that dishonesty of keeping a lie alive is the only way to reclaim both a piece and the peace of the future. And there are also our contemporaneous, divided selves who struggle valiantly to be honest with ourselves—our choices, our white lies, our eagerness to place blame, our difficulty in recognizing that we define our own victimhood and our own heroism. Sitting in those seats, we want to watch and find out how we humans recognize the past and forgive ourselves. That can be overwhelmingly cathartic and deeply comforting in the long run” (Director’s Notes). In The Price, Miller teaches us that often, our failures in life cannot be traced to a hostile uni- verse or a destructive society, but in our inability to recognize the absolute importance of honest and authentic human relationships and that means accepting imperfections and forgiving, includ- ing within ourselves. However, as in all things, there is a price to be paid for our moral instruction. According to Bigsby, “It means granting the death of innocence; it necessitates the acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions. However, the price for ignoring the challenge is even greater. It involves the destruction of human relationships and the erosion of identity—a price paid by both Victor and Walter. At the end of the play, however, purged of all illusions and forced to face the real- ity of their lives they have at least a chance to recreate not only themselves but also the society which they in part represent” (Bigsby, 23). The last time an Arthur Miller play was produced on a Utah Shakespeare Festival stage was 1991’s production of Death of a Salesman. In that production, William Leach, who played Willy Loman, acted alongside his real-life wife Susan Sweeny, who played Linda Loman. This production has become one of the most talked about in the history of the Festival. The Price was written twenty years after Death of a Salesman, and now Festival audiences will once again hear the words of Arthur Miller.

10 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880