More, for a while in the 30's our own William Saroyan, who with all his failings was an authentic American inventor of a domestic absurdist attitude, had held the stage.

I enjoyed watching some of the absurd plays - my first theater experiences were with vaudeville in the 20's, after all, and absurdist comics like Bert Williams and Willie Howard, with their delicious proto-shaggy-dog I was moved to write a play that might confront and confound both. Permanent and morally agonizing Vietnam War, the other a surge of avant-garde plays that to one or another degree fit the absurd styles. Was written in 1967, and since nobody is going to care anymore, it may as well be admitted that in some part it was a reaction to two big events that had come to overshadow all others in that decade. The antic 90-year-old furniture dealer Gregory Solomon, who is yards ahead of them as he tries to shepherd them away from the abyss toward which he knows they are heading.īehind the play - almost any play - are more or less secret responses to other works of the time, and these may emerge as disguised imitation or as outright rejection of the dominating forms of the hour. The conflict of how to divide the proceeds cuts open the long-buried lives of both men, as well as that of Victor's wife, Esther, and reveals the choices each has made and the price each has paid. Now the building, ownedīy the father's brother, is to be torn down, so the furniture must be sold. The play begins decades later on the attic floor of the decrepit brownstone where the cop and his father had lived, surrounded by piles of furniture from their old apartment that the father had clung to. Loyal to the father, dropped out of college to earn a living for them both and ended up on the police force, Walter went on to become a wealthy surgeon. The central figures, the New York cop Victor Franz and his elder brother, Walter,Īre not precise portraits of people I knew long, long ago, but close enough, and Gregory Solomon, the old furniture dealer, is as close as I could get to reproducing a dealer's Russian-Yiddish accent that still ticklesįirst, the bare bones of the play's story: the Great Crash of 1929 left Victor and Walter to care for their widowed father, who had been ruined in the stock market collapse and was helpless to cope with life. ''The Price'' is first of all about a group of people recollected, as it were, in tranquillity. The sources of a play are both obvious and mysterious. Millerĭescribes why he wrote the play, which opened on Broadway That production opens tomorrow night at the Massachusetts presented a revival of ''The Price'' byĪrthur Miller. Last summer, the Williamstown Theater Festival in The Past and Its Power: Why I Wrote 'The Price' By ARTHUR MILLER The Past and Its Power: Why I Wrote 'The Price'

The price arthur miller script