Staging of Arthur Miller’s ‘After the Fall’ Is Rare Indeed

Maybe it’s not enough to know oneself--or maybe it’s too much. For Arthur Miller, questions of personal integrity are as double-edged as they are inescapable, and their full dramatic weight descends with the playwright’s signature uncompromising ethical clarity in a stunning Fountain Theatre revival of his rarely seen masterpiece, “After the Fall.”

Miller keeps a tight rein on the performance rights to his 1964 memory play, which originally sparked controversy over its thinly disguised account of Miller’s short-lived marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The play hasn’t seen a fully staged L.A. production for 24 years.

Fortunately, director Stephen Sachs and his superbly cast ensemble repay the author’s hard-won trust with the intimate focus and delicately nuanced performances required for this challenging work--especially Tracy Middendorf’s tragic heroine.

Employing a kaleidoscopic montage of scenes in place of chronological narrative, the play examines the life of Quentin (Morlan Higgins), an outwardly successful lawyer (and obvious stand-in for Miller).

Refusing to settle for the “workable lies” that others around him invoke to rationalize their self-interest, Quentin looks beneath the accomplishments and high standards of conduct that earned him so many admirers to confront the ways he’s fallen short of his own ideals.

During the Depression, Quentin left his family (Malachi Throne, Mimi Cozzens, Rick Scarry) to deal with their foundering business while he pursued his career. He blames himself for not doing enough for his old friend (Cooper Thornton), a brilliant law professor with a leftist past persecuted in the infamous congressional anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. In an even more intimate failure, his lack of emotional availability irreparably alienated his first ex-wife (Jacqueline Schultz).

Many playwrights (including Miller) have devoted entire plays to each of these moral quandaries. To coalesce them so precisely and economically--through brief exchanges and telling details--is the gift of a mature playwright who surpassed even his formidable (and more familiar) previous accomplishments. In their brief stage time, finely tuned supporting performances from Lenny Citrano, Pat Destro, Colleen Quinn and Laura Margolis mine richly complex characters from the sparse text.

Ironically, it’s that ability to sort through surface distractions and excavate the deeper nuggets that cuts Quentin off from emotional participation in his own life. “We are killing each other with abstraction,” he despairs at the height of his marital troubles.

Quentin finds an antidote of sorts to his own abstraction in Maggie (Middendorf), the telephone operator-turned-glamorous singer/star. Nowhere is the play’s autobiographical content more nakedly apparent than in their tortured relationship.

Although Sachs doesn’t shy away from the erotic Monroe mystique in his staging, Middendorf skillfully crafts her own riveting core to the character. Maggie’s unfiltered immediacy--which Quentin mistakes for innocence--may connect her more directly with the world through passion and sensation, but it also dooms her to a life of perpetual moments strung tenuously together with only a desperate need for stability and reassurance.

Despite accusations at the time of the play’s debut that Miller was exploiting the memory of the recently deceased Marilyn, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, at great personal cost he honors their marriage as a window into the most profound human depths.

“After the Fall,” Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends March 31. $24. (323) 663-1525. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.