Theatrical Outfit Offers a Great ‘Price’

Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit, with co-producer The Breman Museum, is winding up a successful month-long run of Arthur Miller’s “The Price.” The play, one of the most notable successes of the famed playwright’s middle life, centers on two brothers who haven’t spoken for 16 years. They are finally brought together, sometime after their father’s death, to settle what remains of his estate. His many possessions are stacked and laid out like a frame around the drama. It’s a clutter of old furniture and bric-a-brak that seems to enclose the action and focus on the intensity of this production.

As the play unfolds, it quickly becomes apparent that there is more to settle here than the sale of furniture and other personal possessions their elderly father has left behind. The play, which was originally written to be performed without an intermission, gains one here, and springs to full life after the slow building tension of the initial first hour of the performance.

You can almost feel the crackle of emotion leap from the stage as the two brothers escalate their arguments that are sparked by how to put a price on their father’s remaining property. In the second half of the play, we come to understand the long simmering grudges each man holds against the other.

Two of Atlanta’s finest actors, Eric Mendenhall and Andrew Benator, bring a tautly focused edge to their individual portrayals. Each has looked at life and their choices and now they must calculate the price they have paid for the journey.

Benator is the polished and highly successful surgeon, Walter Franz, who has carved out a life of wealth and privilege that’s symbolized by the careful tailoring of his suit and the luxurious cashmere overcoat that he wears. And even though it’s clear he made some difficult choices and had some significant setbacks, his smug satisfaction with where life has taken him is in sharp contrast to where life has taken his brother.

His brother, Victor, played by Mendenhall, is nearing retirement as a New York cop, whose overwhelming sense of failure is echoed by his long-suffering wife, Esther, ably portrayed by Cara Mantella. His lifetime of regret hangs on him like the ill-fitting police uniform he wears.

Even though he showed intellectual promise and a quick mind as a young man, Victor Franz sacrificed his future to care for an ailing and infirm father, who depended on his son for what seemed like his very survival. One man, rich and successful, sends $5 a week for the old man’s upkeep. The other sacrifices all that he is and all that he would be to keep his father alive.

Miller is pretty clear here. For better or worse, we are our choices and there is no turning back from what has passed.

“The Price” is great theater, that unwinds with all deliberate speed as we watch the scars that each man has carefully tended torn open for all of us to see.  Sitting in the intimate space that is the Theatrical Outfit theater gives one the impression that we are watching this intense dramatic performance with a power that makes it difficult for any of us to turn away.

As if to relieve us of the dramatic tension that is so much a part of this drama, Miller has created an old, craftly used furniture dealer, portrayed by Brian Kurlander, who arrives early in the production as a kind of wizened fallen angel with a strong Yiddish accent. He’s a shrewd bargain hunter who knows from long experience that time and the opportunity to strike a good price are on his side.

Together, the four actors demonstrate what ensemble performance is all about, the give and take, the skill they make us all believe that we are not so much watching a play as we are witnessing life itself. It’s another triumph for Benator, Kurlander, Mendenhall, and director Matt Torney. They were responsible for the superb production of “The Lehman Trilogy” last year at the same theater and they have been reunited with Carla Mantella for another triumph.

“The Price” may be many things, and Arthur Miller has not been shy about describing why he wrote it and what it all means. But, at its heart, it seems fundamentally to be a meditation on loss and separation and the wounds that time inflicts on the soul. The Theatrical Outfit, to its credit, has given us a wonderful evening of theater and a timely reminder of the gift that live performance offers.