A Timely Incident

Preview of Incident at Vichy, New Haven Theater Company

This week the New Haven Theater Company tries something a little different. This is the first time they’ve held a staged reading as part of their season. According to NHTC member J. Kevin Smith, who directs the reading of Arthur Miller’s unduly neglected play Incident at Vichy this weekend, the “idea [of staged readings] has been kicked around” by NHTC for some time, but until now it hasn’t happened.

The reason, Smith says, is that the shows NHTC does produce are always “passion projects” proposed by one of the members who then gets the others on board. Though the idea of staged readings of plays that might be new or overlooked may be a good one, no one had come up with a particular play that was a clear choice.

It so happened that Smith saw a PBS broadcast of Signature Theater’s production of Vichy, and that got him thinking about how he would want to do this particular play, “how it should look and be played.” Smith, who hasn’t directed a play since a Yeats one act in college, said his fellow NHTCers were very supportive of his idea, especially as they could all see the relevance of doing the play now, in this fall’s run-up to a very key national election. So much so that The League of Women Voters of New Haven—a non-partisan group, Smith points out—will be on-hand to register voters before and after the show.

The play will be given “an enhanced staged reading,” Smith says, which means there will be some limited use of lights and sound, as well as entrances and exits of characters. The cast, which numbers 16, will comprise all the male actors in the company, supplemented by other local actors. As part of his pitch, Smith “wanted everyone [in NHTC] to be involved.” The difficulty of coordinating the entire company for the usual 8 weeks of rehearsal for a full show would have been enormous. Which is one benefit of the staged reading approach. Mainly, though, for Smith, the main benefit is about timeliness.

Watching the PBS broadcast, he said, “sent shivers up my spine: the references to the power of the 1%; the wonder at the raw power of cults of personality; the demonization of ‘The Other’—the language is amazingly current.” Indeed, the play “is the ultimate collaborator story,” showing how fear and despair can undermine political courage. For Smith, the play’s main message is one of “vigilance.” “It reminds us we have to be firm in knowing what we’re willing to do to confront oppression.”

While not one of what Smith calls “the trifecta” of staggeringly great plays Miller wrote—The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, Death of a Salesman—Incident at Vichy is a commanding work. Smith also notes that NHTC has held off from doing the great playwrights of the American canon—Miller, O’Neill, Williams—so that this short three-day run is kind of “testing the waters.” The company has done very well by such classics as Inge’s Bus Stop, Wilder’s Our Town, and Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, so maybe a full production of one of the major American dramatists will happen in the future.

For now, this Thursday through Saturday—days after the first of the three presidential debates—NHTC offers a chance to consider the implications of a chilling work about the effects of evil in power and about the moral test of resisting corruption and oppression.

Like Zappa’s old Mothers of Invention tune sez, with knowing irony, “it can’t happen here.”

Monceau (George Kulp), Old Jew (Erich Greene)

The New Haven Theater Company presents a special staged reading of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, directed by J. Kevin Smith, running for one weekend only; Thursday, September 29 – Saturday, October 1. Performances are at 8pm at the NHTC Stage at the English Building Markets, located at 839 Chapel Street, New Haven. Tickets are $15, at www.NewHavenTheaterCompany.com

New Haven Theater Company is Megan Keith Chenot, Peter Chenot, Drew Gray, Erich Greene, George Kulp, Margaret Mann, Deena Nicol-Blifford, Steve Scarpa, Christian Shaboo, J. Kevin Smith, John Watson, and Trevor Williams.

Do We Not Bleed?

Review of Broken Glass at Westport Country Playhouse

To celebrate the centennial of the birth of famed playwright Arthur Miller, Westport Country Playhouse has staged a late Miller play. Broken Glass, which was nominated for a Tony for 1994, debuted at the Long Wharf Theatre. The revival at Westport, directed by Artistic Director Mark Lamos, does the play proud, with some of the finest acting to have graced Connecticut stages this year. The entire cast is excellent and match their roles perfectly, while two actors familiar to Connecticut audiences—Steven Skybell and Felicity Jones—do some of their best work to date.

The play, like most of Miller’s best-known plays, is very intense and doesn’t offer much in the way of lighter moments. Set in the U.S. in 1938, the period of the play is historically significant as the time of “Kristallnacht,” or the night of broken glass, as Nazis came to power in Germany and took Austria, destroying Jewish shops, burning synagogues, beating-up Jews, and perpetrating other acts of thuggishness in their fascistic zeal. At this time, a Jewish couple in America, Phillip and Sylvia Gellberg, played by Skybell and Jones, are experiencing a mysterious kind of trauma. Sylvia suddenly finds herself unable to walk. As the play opens, Phillip is receiving word from cautious and thoughtful Dr. Hyman (Stephen Schnetzer) that the doctors can find nothing physically wrong with Sylvia. He believes the problem is psychosomatic, and that means delving below the surface in the Gellbergs’ marriage.

Steven Skybell (Phillip Gellburg), Stephen Schnetzer (Dr. Harry Hyman)

In that first scene, Skybell lets us learn much about Phillip: his reticence, his deep concern for his wife, his difficulties with her and with the marriage that has shaped him, his pride in his role as the only Jew employed by a Brooklyn trust company (he works in foreclosures) and in his son as a Jew rising in the armed forces, and his deep ambivalence toward other Jews and to “what is happening in Germany.” He’s mainly concerned that outright antisemitism there may inspire more aggressive forms of antisemitism here. Phillip is not really a sympathetic character and yet Skybell makes us care about him even though there’s a real threat here. He may crack up, he may become violent. Before the evening ends, we will see him weep, plead, suffer, accuse and attack, and drop to the floor with a heart attack. And through it all Skybell makes us consider what happens to a man when he is out of his depth, when the delicate détente of his marriage begins to fray in such a way that professional help becomes imperative.

It’s hard to believe the play was written in the Nineties, so steadfastly does it feel like a vision from an earlier time: the Thirties as seen by the Fifties, perhaps. Which is a way of saying that the writing feels like it must precede the Sixties and the Seventies with their greater laxity of locution. Dialogue in this play may feel prosy, on the page, but as delivered by this stellar cast, directed by Lamos, who has worked directly with Miller in the latter’s long career, the dialogue’s precision and nuance of character is exemplary. Even relatively minor roles, such as Phillip’s ultra-WASPy boss Stanton Case (John Hillner) and Harriet (Merrritt Janson), Sylvia’s sister, come across as actual people with actual lives.

Harriet, in particular, speaks with authority about her sister’s life in a way that seems informed by decades of observation and gossip. And Dr. Hyman’s wife, Margaret (Angela Reed), provides useful shading to the good doctor; her sense of how easily he becomes infatuated with his female patients makes us wary of his interest in the psychology of Sylvia’s case. Miller lets his minor characters play their parts and get out of the way; their contributions help us grasp the levels of the situation and add a deeper sense of the play’s “no man is an island” context. The Skybells, the Hymans, are in many ways unremarkable, and yet, once we begin to remark them, we will see subterfuge and shame and other issues, some long-buried, some still close to the surface, that must be confronted.

Stephen Schnetzer (Dr. Harry Hyman), Felicity Jones (Sylvia Gellburg)

The use of paralysis and impotence as figures for U.S. Jewry’s inability to do anything for their German counterparts is a bit too obvious as metaphor, we might say. But to treat ironically Miller’s figures for an international incapacity to help the persecuted (quite relevant to the moment with the question of Syrian refugees) would be to spoil the play horribly. Sylvia Gellburg’s reaction to such suffering is physical, and, in her marriage long ago, the failure of the physical, bodily aspect of love became the occasion for violence. Miller’s text seems true to the Thirties where Freud’s “Jewish cure” of talking about the past to find psychological truth comes up against the “Jewish question”—both are aspects of life not often talked about in polite society then. And so the drama of sadly unhappy people coming to grips with both resonates as catharsis-seeking theater.

Felicity Jones (Sylvia Gellburg)

Much of that level of feeling comes from Felicity Jones’ subtle enactment of Sylvia Gellburg. There are so many ways one might react to her predicament: aging woman’s last hope of attracting sensitive male attention; unhappy wife finding a way to pay back her husband, who doesn’t dominate so much as demand acceptance, for his treatment of her; sensitive woman driven to distraction and illness by the methodical brutality of the times; confused and lonely soul needing compassion, and finding, in Kristallnacht, a figure for mankind’s lack of compassion. Jones makes us see all this in Sylvia’s strength and weakness, her passion and her pathos. Even her tears come to us through a veil of attribution: is it self-pity, a play for sympathy, or a dawning grasp of a tragic sense of life? Key to Miller’s play is the notion that, if people can only find a way to speak of what ails them, much that is dark and disturbing to ourselves about ourselves might become less grievous and appalling. We might have to accept how much we need the views of others to see ourselves aright.

Michael Yeargan’s scenic design—including artfully manipulated bed and chairs and a reflective backdrop that, before the play begins, shows the audience to itself and later lets us see bedridden Sylvia from above—and the lighting by the impeccable Stephen Strawbridge, together with Candice Donelly’s costumes and David Budries’ sound design, add to the impressiveness of this fully realized production of a challenging and rewarding play.  

Arthur Miller’s
Broken Glass
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Michael Yeargan; Costume Design: Candice Donnelly; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: David Budries; Props Master: Karin White; Movement Consultant: Michael Rossmy; Dialect Coach: Louis Colaianni; Casting: Tara Rubin Casting; Production Stage Manager: Matthew Melchiorre; Photographs: T. Charles Erikson

Cast: John Hillner; Merritt Janson; Felicity Jones; Angela Reed; Stephen Schnetzer; Steven Skybell

Westport Country Playhouse
October 6-24, 2015