The Price (Roundabout Theatre Company at American Airlines Theatre) by Arthur Miller

I had never heard of, nor seen a production of The Price.  I am a fan of Miller’s work and was also drawn in by what turned out to be the perfect casting of Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub, Jessica Hecht and Danny DeVito.  I am so, so glad I went.

 The Price is the story of two brothers who are long estranged and have taken extraordinarily different life paths; Mark Ruffalo as Victor and Tony Shalhoub as Walter.  Victor is a workaday cop, though you find out early on that he fenced at an Ivy League school, and Walter is a successful and wealthy surgeon. The brothers find themselves, along with Victor’s somewhat emotionally fragile wife, Esther (an, as always, terrific Jessica Hecht) in an attic apartment filled to the rafters with the remains of their wealthy childhood that had disintegrated with the crash of ’29.

Rounding out this wonderful cast is an absolutely revelatory Danny DeVito as Gregory Solomon, an almost 90 year-old furniture dealer who comes to take a look at the goods as a way to relieve the boredom of sitting around waiting to die.

The entire play takes place in the apartment in the space of a few hours and the revelations about the brother’s dynamic, their father’s deceptions and the horrors that family can pack into the bags you carry into the future are riveting.

Tolstoy’s Karenina tells us that “ ....there are as many minds as there are heads ….as many kinds of love as there are hearts”; there are also, always, as many versions of family truth as number of members in that family.