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by Arthur Miller, directed by Rod Ceballos

Equity Showcase Theatre, Toronto

March 18-April 3, 2004

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by Arthur Miller, directed by Cameron White

BirdLand Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

March 16-April 3, 2004

Except for Shakespeare in summer, it’s unusual to find two plays by the same author playing simultaneously in Toronto.  It’s rarer still when both are revivals of lesser known works.  While it’s good to see more of Arthur Miller’s output, it turns out that After the Fall (1964) presented by Equity Showcase and especially The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991) presented by BirdLand Theatre are not just lesser known but lesser plays.  Miller’s classic works like The Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are written in a realistic mode.  When he attempts a memory play as in Fall or a satiric fantasy as in Ride, his style becomes bloated and over-explanatory as if he is afraid the audience won’t get his points unless they’re hammered repeatedly home. 

At the centre of both plays is a twice-married middle-aged male in crisis who has ruined the lives of both his wives.  Of the two, the highly autobiographical Fall is the more intriguing.  Quentin, the Miller figure, is suffering an existential crisis.  Since he no longer believes in God or idealism, why does he feel burdened with guilt for crimes  he did not directly commit and how can he free himself from it?  Act 1 deals with his inability to mourn the death of his mother, the betrayal of a friend to McCarthyism and his inability to love his first wife.  Miller’s attempt to universalize Quentin’s guilt by comparing it to post-war Germany’s guilt for the Holocaust seems unbelievably self-aggrandizing.  Act 2, however, sizzles with the introduction of Maggie (Lesley Faulkner), the Marilyn Monroe figure who becomes Quentin’s second wife.  Anyone wondering what the intellectual Miller and the sex goddess Monroe saw in each other need look no further than this play written only two years after Monroe’s suicide.

Faulkner gives an absolutely riveting performance, never seeking to impersonate Monroe, but capturing her combination of innocence and sexiness, willfulness and insecurity, vivacity and self-destructiveness so completely it sends shivers down your spine.  The role of Quentin, garrulously veering from self-pity to self-justification, is a difficult one.  Gallaccio makes him as attractive as possible but the very smoothness of his delivery tends to undermine the character’s supposedly unleavened angst.  Tautly directed by Rod Ceballos, the 15-member cast provides several fine performances.

Ride seems like a parody of Fall.  It’s as if Miller thought, “What if Quentin had married his two wives--the proper, uptight one and the sexy, uninhibited one--simultaneously?”   In Ride the symbolically named bigamist Lyman Felt (Ron White) survives a car crash on Mt. Morgan and the hospital informs both wives (Kate Trotter and Zorana Kydd).   Scenes of reality, memory and fantasy fill us in on the wives’ frosty meeting and Lyman’s past relations with them. 

Reviewers of the New York production saw the play as a comedy and mention all the laughs it provoked.  You’d never think that from the BirdLand production that treats even the most outrageous scenes as dully serious. This failure to catch the piece’s satiric nature must be due to the tragic circumstances surrounding the production.  30-year-old director Cameron Wright  died suddenly just one week into rehearsals and two cast members, White and Peter Van Wart, decided to co-direct the show to preserve his vision.  Unfortunately they do not achieve a point of view cohesive enough to make sense of the frequently bizarre events that include lion and shark attacks.

Even if the overall tone is wrong, White and Trotter give strong, totally engaged performances.  Kydd does not really conjure up the American counterculture her character is supposed to represent.  Both productions will give anyone interested in Miller a view of the author’s vicious self-laceration missing from his masterpieces.   However, if that’s what you want,  pass on the confused and inconsequential Ride and plunge straight into his torturous Fall.               

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-03-18.

Photo: Kate Trotter, Ron White and Zorana Kydd in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. ©2004 BirdLand Theatre.