1993 Press Photo Sol Freider,The Price, Jewish Ensemble

Caption: Sol FreiderIn the 1940s Arthur Miller wrote a masterpiece of a play about two brothers and a father whose American dream went very, very bad. He called it "Death of a Salesman."Some 20 years later, he wrote another play about two brothers and a father whose American dream went very, very bad, threw in an 89-year-old used furniture dealer, and called it "The Price."Within the text he also provided guidance to its future actors and directors. Fortunately, the audience didn't have to read it."He had perfected a way of leaning on his cane without looking weak..She laughs with a knowing abandonment of good sense." With all its advice to the actors, "The Price" is the rare stage work that may play faster than it reads.Sheesh, Miller even provides stage stage directions for the props. "There is a rich heaviness, something almost Germanic about the furniture, a weight of time upon the bulging fronts and curving chests."In the Jewish Ensemble Theatre's illuminating production, "The Price" plays better than it reads. This is a five-character drama told with four characters. The fifth is the patriarch of the Franz family, dead and buried 16 years before the time of the play but whose life and personality are at its core. Alive and kicking, sometimes at each other (metaphorically, anyway), are Victor Franz, a New York City police sergeant; his more ambitious wife Esther, a sort of Lady Macbeth without the killer instinct; Walter Franz, Victor's rich doctor brother; and Gregory Solomon, the aged and wonderful furniture dealer who has come to appraise the contents of the Franz ancestral home, a cramped attic apartment.As the play opens the brothers have neither seen nor spoken to each other in 16 years. Indeed, it seems possible they may not communicate for another 16 years. This is Miller in his Clifford Odets mode. Victor, once a promising science student, joined the police department to support their ruined father and allow Walter to go to medical school. Old wounds will be reopened.