Esther, slightly peevish, stands by, even after Gregory Solomon (Danny DeVito) turns up. Victor promises that they’ll move on for sure, just as soon as he closes a deal with the guy who’s coming to take all this furniture off their hands. She wants to get out, go to the movie he’s promised to take her to, anything.
Anyway, Esther thinks it’s creepy to hang out in this space, home to so much pain. There’s a little rancor in her voice, and shyness, too: like many a Miller heroine, she loves her guy because of his various complications but she’s a little afraid of him, too. She’s just had one, she says, a trifle defensively. Victor doesn’t answer her when she asks him what’s up with all that instead, he focusses on the drink that Esther’s holding. Victor’s slim, dark-haired wife, Esther (Jessica Hecht), walks in on her partner laughing along with a laughing record, one of those novelty disks where two men try to have a conversation without cracking up. Victor slowly enters an old room filled with the relics of the past-a Victrola, chairs, a breakfront, and so on-and, of course, he is bemused and rueful and sad as he walks down memory lane, sometimes touching a piece of old furniture, or listening to a scratchy old record, because this is a realistic play by Arthur Miller, the author of “All My Sons” (1947) and “Death of a Salesman” (1949), elegies about hope made corrupt by the exigencies of living, and about how the past pulls at the present.
He lived there with his brother Walter (Tony Shalhoub) and their now dead parents. He has returned to a brownstone in Manhattan-it sags, too-that’s about to be demolished it was his childhood home. police sergeant whose body and handsome face sag a little with regret. Victor Franz (Mark Ruffalo) is a fortyish N.Y.C. What drives each of the three works is memory, and how it can twist or reveal the truth, making unreliable narrators of us all. Arthur Miller’s “The Price” (in revival at the American Airlines, under the direction of Terry Kinney) premièred on Broadway in 1968, four years after Miller’s other mid-career plays “After the Fall” and “Incident at Vichy” were produced at Lincoln Center.
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