Playwright: Arthur Miller
At: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.
Phone: (773) 338-2177; $20-$25
Runs through: May 2
The two Beeves brothers are doomed to suffer, but for manifestly different reasons. Amos is being groomed for a career in major-league baseball, passing his winters pitching in the basement cage built by his doting father. David has no such grand aspirations, however, with the result that everything he essays seems to bring him further success, often in uncanny ways. But nothing is certain in this imperfect world—and both men eventually find themselves forced to confront paths other than those meted out for them.
So how ARE we to conduct our lives in a fickle universe? In his first professionally produced play, Arthur Miller—in 1944, himself not yet 30—argues the question with allegorical orderliness: The ambitious Beeves paterfamilias attempts to control fate. The childless J.B. laments his ill-luck, but makes no effort to change it. The crippled Shory declares that we are slaves to wayward chance, while the immigrant Gustav takes the existential view—that we must enjoy the good times and accept the bad, or what else IS there to life?
This is a formidable symposium to pack into a single play—11 characters, counting messengers and provocateurs. But in this flawed prototype, we can see the archetypes later portrayed in greater detail by the author who would become one of the great American playwrights of his century: the obsessively domineering father, the stifled and self-destructive son, the husband who fears the waning of his breadwinning powers, the avuncular counselor unfettered by inflated agendas, the helpless wives/mothers/ sweethearts/sisters/daughters who can only weep over their troubled men.
Under Michael Menendian's direction, an ensemble of Raven regulars deliver richly textured performances, generating empathy and dramatic tension while never compromising the efficiency that wraps the plot-driven text into a neat two-hour package. Jeremy Glickstein projects a palpable vulnerability as the inexplicably favored David, while Chas Vrba endows Gustav with a gravity and wisdom becoming a pilgrim far more mature than the script requires. Noteworthy work is likewise forthcoming from Ron Quade, Daniel Ruben, Larry Carani and Dean LaPrairie, who forge whole and believable personalities belying the utility assigned them by a literary genius at the advent of his career.