Fog lifts on Miller’s memento

The protagonist of Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall” harangues himself with such generalities as: “I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.” Nothing, however, floats the rhetorical bloat that is Miller’s 1964 drama like the sight of Carla Gugino in a sundress and specs, flashing a smile of bright, vaguely desperate exuberance.

Or this: The sight of a playful, pocketbook-wielding Gugino whacking the arm of Peter Krause, the nominal headliner in this Roundabout Theatre Company revival. With a throaty, spontaneous laugh, Gugino whaps her costar with the force and comic topspin of Julia Louis-Dreyfus thwacking Jerry on “Seinfeld.”

Or later, this: The sound of Gugino’s nerve-racked and nerve-racking cackle, splitting the air after her character has been choked by her husband, nearly to a wished-for death.

This is a considerable Broadway debut. Gugino has proved herself a genial, casually glamorous performer, best known for television (the short-lived “Karen Sisco”) and the movies (“Spy Kids,” all three of them). She is new to the stage and to the rigors and expectations of Broadway -- albeit Broadway in the summer of 2004, a place and time not long on mega-wattage.

Yet as Maggie, the self-immolating media sensation whose marriage to Miller’s protagonist may have a little something to do with Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe, Gugino is more than merely attractive or interesting. She’s an emotional maelstrom. Her instincts are sharp enough to make this potentially exhausting train wreck unpredictable at every turn.

Gugino betrayed some vocal strain in an early press preview performance. That’s about the extent of her problems. Even though Miller’s conception of the character relies more on cold pity than on vivid empathy, Gugino invests so much life, wit and heat in the role, “After the Fall” really does fall to somewhere from somewhere, above and beyond the vagaries.

You don’t get any of this from the Playbill cover. The program photo depicts Krause, riding high at the moment in HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” alone in deep, clenched introspection, his eyes closed as if blocking out a bad memory. Krause is a pretty good actor, working hard to impart something beyond diffidence in the role of Quentin, Miller’s liberal attorney weighing an imminent third marriage as well as a 10-ton conscience.

At the outset, Quentin awaits the arrival of Holga, his new love, survivor of the Holocaust. She is a lifeline of sanity for Miller’s recessive, judgmental but Lincolnesque protagonist. (He’s smug too.) In flashes and flashbacks, we see bits of Quentin’s previous lives, his mother issues, his father issues, his “cold and remote” issues with his first wife, his blacklisted colleague, his attraction/repulsion issues embodied by Maggie, Wife No. 2.

Krause is solid, and he gives nearly as good as he gets from Gugino in the Act 2 explosions. But Gugino sets the tone and the temperature for this revival, directed and edited with care by Michael Mayer. The director’s not foolproof -- he did “Thoroughly Modern Millie” no favors -- but Mayer and scenic designer Richard Hoover have managed a first-rate visual solution to the blobby problems posed by the text. Rather than a neutral limbo of a space, this “After the Fall” unfolds in an eerily empty wing of a 1962-era airport terminal. All gray swirls and lines, it’s an apt setting for a swirling memory play.

In Quentin’s windy confessions to his unseen friend, who is very obviously an analyst, we sense big themes unsteadily grasped. “Why do I feel an understanding with this slaughterhouse?” he asks us, after a visit to a concentration camp. Or, thinking of his childhood family acrimony: “Why do I think of things falling apart? Were they ever whole?” Regarding Maggie: “Why did I lie to her, play this cheap benefactor?” Regarding Miller: Why can’t first-rate playwrights set themselves limits on the number of rhetorical questions a protagonist is allowed to ask?

Mayer has cut about half an hour from this thicket, excising a supporting character (a woman serving only to deify Quentin) as well as reordering scenes. The hospital encounter between Quentin, Quentin’s brother and their bedridden father, for example, now comes later than originally scripted. It’s better that way. Act 2, now more forcefully and purposefully dedicated to the Quentin/Maggie grudge matches, plays far better than Act 1.

Pliable but not stereotypically bimbiotic, Gugino’s Maggie infuses the early, sunny scenes with so much juice, and the downward-spiral-to-hell passages with such genuine pathos, you feel as though you’re actually at a play, rather than an idea for a play.

“After the Fall” turned out not to be Miller’s only exploration, oblique or direct, of the Marilyn phenomenon as he lived it. This fall, the Goodman Theatre premieres Miller’s newest, a bittersweet comedy called “Finishing the Picture,” inspired by Miller’s experiences on the set of “The Misfits.” One character in the new play is Case, the cinematographer on the picture. “Who do these classy European directors pick to act out their profound spiritual dramas?” he wonders. “Does Bergman cast some flat-chested, bucktoothed sack of bones?” That’s brash, unpretentious film criticism. And in it lies an undeniable link to the Miller play currently on Broadway.

Gugino is a sensation.

Amid the portentous gassiness of “After the Fall,” in which one man’s relationship problems somehow become as pressing as the Holocaust itself, Gugino is the pin aimed straight at the balloon.

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Michael Phillips is theater critic for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Co. newspaper.