Playwright: Arthur Miller
At: The Artistic Home, 1420 W. Irving Park
Phone: (773) 404-1100; $18
Runs through: April 6
One of the joys of this job is discovery … the joy of finding a little storefront venue that's small in space and small in budget, but enormous in ambition, talent, and imagination. The Artistic Home is such a venue. Their latest production, After the Fall, proves it.
After the Fall is a later play written by Arthur Miller, and even though it has been fictionalized, it's readily apparent that this is a play about Miller's relationships with women, filtered through retrospect. Oh sure, the play deals with anti-Semitism, family strife, McCarthyism, and infidelity. But what After the Fall is really about is the influence women have had on this extraordinary creator's life. From a mother who was a frustrated intellectual, to a series of relationships with disparate females, Miller is cathartically exploring the tremendous impact the feminine gender had on his life and his work. And the most central of those relationships, both in celluloid history and in this play is the playwright's marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
In After the Fall, Miller makes Marilyn Maggie and changes her from a movie star to a pop singing sensation. But Monroe's tragic presence is writ large here.
In lesser hands, this story could be saddled with the dreaded artistic categorization of 'therapeutic,' but Miller skillfully, and elliptically, portrays a life here, and leads us on a sometimes-harrowing journey into the heart and mind of that life. In lesser hands, a theater company could take this work and make it leaden-paced, or patently obvious, wringing it for its aspects of sensationalism. But the Artistic Home lives up to its name. Director Kathy Scambiatterra has a sure reign on the oft-difficult proceedings here, and moves things along with flawless pacing, carefully modulating the emotional highs and lows to make them credible and better, moving.
Helping her in this task are two outstanding performances at the center of After the Fall. As Quentin, the defense attorney stand-in for playwright Miller, John Mossman hits all the right notes: always subtle, always sympathetic in spite of his character's very obvious and painful flaws, this is a performance that could triumph at any venue, including the larger ones further south of the Artistic Home. But it's the portrayal of Maggie, by Georgann Charuhas, that really made me take notice. Here is an actor working at what must be her artistic peak. It would be easy to ape Monroe for this role, but Charuhas wisely avoids trying that. Instead, she brings to the fore all of the vulnerability, insecurity, and coiled sexuality that marked Monroe's brief rise and fall and that made her a cultural icon. Her Maggie is a fully fleshed out character and she makes us understand how her own personal demons made her ultimately self-destructive. She lets us see why Quentin was both drawn and repelled by her. Having these two fine performances at the center of what some might call one of Miller's least linear, plot-driven pieces truly makes it sing.
After the Fall is one of those theater bargains that is almost too good to be true. For less than 20 bucks, you can see some of the finest creative and acting talent in the area. Don't miss it.
