Some Moments of Clarity in Cluttered Attic of ‘The Price’

It’s great to see a veteran actor walk onto a stage as if it were no big deal and quietly take it for his own--without taking anything away from anyone else in the vicinity.

As furniture dealer Gregory Solomon, the most interesting aspect of Arthur Miller’s gassy 1968 play “The Price,” Allan Arbus brings a combination of gravity and ease to the Laguna Playhouse production. This wise old owl acts as the spiritual referee of a long-standing grudge match between brothers dividing up their family belongings. As performed without a trace of strain by Arbus, Solomon is fine company.

“The Price” itself is less so. It has its champions. It had a recent, brief Broadway revival and has enjoyed steady exposure on regional and international stages. Yet there’s a hollowness to its characters and arguments. Miller’s disquisitions on time, fathers and sons, and money, money, money rattle around the cluttered attic setting like reminders of better, more vivid Miller works past.

The attic sits above a brownstone scheduled for demolition (this is 1968, not the present day). The first to arrive is Victor Franz (Herb Mendelsohn), a cop who never liked his work, who sacrificed a career in science to take care of his Depression-clobbered father.

Brother Walter (Steve Vinovich) got out: He became a big-shot doctor, owing to Victor’s self-sacrificing. He has conveniently forgotten this over the years. Perhaps the business of selling the furniture will bring these two back in sync, after 16 years of silence.

With Victor’s hard-drinking, embittered wife Esther (Marilyn Fox) egging the brothers on, the old familial wounds get a thorough picking. There’s good, pertinent material here. When Esther refers to World War II as a time when “any idiot was making so much money,” it’s hard not to think of the late 1990s, tech stocks and the economic cold shower to come.

Over and over, Miller has, in effect, written a series of Depression plays--stories pinned down and haunted by the effects of the 1929 market crash. “The Price” is no exception. Every act has its costs, Miller argues. But this play’s tone wobbles between squabbling comedy and despairing melodrama. And the more it becomes about What Dad Really Did to Us all those years ago, the less vital it seems.

It certainly doesn’t benefit from the glacial, hands-off pacing favored by director Richard Stein. Arbus and Vinovich fare best in these extra-roomy circumstances. Mendelsohn and Fox both have strong isolated moments; with a few more performances behind them, they could be quite good indeed. But “The Price” doesn’t need extra emphasis when it comes to its thesis statements and dramatic confrontations. The Laguna production’s first 20 minutes, in which we see the forces eating at Victor and Esther’s drifting marriage, are played like a dirge--like the end of the play, not the start.

Through it all Arbus glides like a pro, avoiding cute-comic-relief-isms as well as voice-of-the-author portentousness. He goes without the cane called for in Miller’s script, making his way543257199furniture-crammed attic set. To Miller’s credit, none of his four schematically opposed characters is purely good or evil (though Solomon is what you might call borderline-biblically cute). Yet “The Price” huffs and puffs to activate its central questions: Which brother hath been wronged? Who owes whom?

Arbus and Vinovich, thankfully, don’t owe Laguna Beach audiences anything. They’ve already settled their tab, with a pair of lively, wily performances.

* “The Price,” Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road (Highway 133), Laguna Beach. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. (no 7 p.m. performance Feb. 4). Ends Feb. 4. $34-$43. (949) 497-2787. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

The Price

Herb Mendelsohn: Victor Franz

Marilyn Fox: Esther Franz

Allan Arbus: Gregory Solomon

Steve Vinovich: Walter Franz

Written by Arthur Miller. Directed by Richard Stein. Scenic design by Don Gruber. Costumes by Dwight Richard Odle. Lighting by Paulie Jenkins. Sound by David Edwards. Production stage manager Marti Stone.