1939: GLOBAL MOMENT , INTIMATE PAIN
There are some tremendous moments in the last ten minutes of this late-period Arthur Miller play: some from Pearl Chanda as Sylvia, some from Eli Gelb as her emotionally disintegrating husband Phillip and Alex Waldman as the doctor, Harry, who has been trying to heal her of “hysterical paralysis”. It becomes a great complicated cry from the soul of the Jewish diaspora in 1930’s New York, and equally one from the personal distress of a marriage.
And at this late point, leaning forward, gripped and driven along half a dozen tracks of thought, you can just about forgive it for certain longeurs in the preceding 110 minutes (it’s two hours straight through , as it should be) . And it’s worth it, because it is by Miller, to whom attention always should be paid, directed by Jordan Fein who gave us that remarkable Fiddler on the Roof, well cast and magnificently played and – moreover – agonizingly topical towards our present global politics.
But brace yourself: too much is talk, often circular, in dim lamplight and psychosexual confusion, penned in a deep arena littered with newspapers and benches and a bed, where uninvolved characters stay trapped in corners. Sylvia has suddenly been gripped with a genuine, but physically unattributable, inability to stand or walk. It is 1939 : her shock paralysis seems to be rooted in horror at the newspaper pictures of Kristallnacht and the jeering, humiliating crowds laughing at old Jewish men forced to scrub the sidewalk with toothbrushes. Her great cry – late on in the play – is “Where is America, where is England, youve gotta do something before they murder us all”.
Her husband is puzzled, a prim chap always in black, and before his disintegration with the smoothest of waxed partings. He is proud of his job in mortgages but even more of his unseen son for going into the army – a Jew needn’t just be a lawyer, banker of businessman , and he himself “doesnt run with the crowd, who says a Jes has to be a Democrat?” Late on, when Dr Harry is challenging him, this attitude becomes clear as an attempt to resist the otherness of being a Jew and “melt into the goyim”. Phillip in his despair about both Sylvia and a professional setback and implication from his boss that Jews stick together against the mainstream, wishes he had been a proper fulltime observant Jew in the comfort of ritual and community. He’s a lost soul: Miller is expressing something interesting here, a sort of parallel with Sylvia’s distress: what is it to be Jewish? Why must we be?
He adores Sylvia, but has been pretty much impotent these twenty years, somthing he lies about to Dr Harry. His wife’s collapse is overwhelming him to the point sometimes of violent anger; he cannot bring himself to understand why the events half a world away are so threatening to her, safe in NY. Though there’s also a sense that she has made Harry into that distant enemy (can’t help thinking of Sylvia Plath’s terrifying poem about father or husband as “a man in black with a Meinkampf look”: female sense of weakness, oppression) . At one point Harry perceptively says “it’s like she’s connected to some wire that goes right around the world”. And maybe, more thoughts intruding, this is so: perhaps some spirits absorb and genuinely suffer , at distance, the sickness of the world. Ideas spin out from the play even when you’re most frustrated with it, and indeed with Harry’s inappropriate own sexual feelings about the poor woman.
But I forgave Harry-the-character everything during his exasperated yelling at the collapsed Phillip near the end. As a doctor, he points out, everybody who comes in thinks they’re persecuted – by whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, protestants, catholics, whoever – and everyone’s scared, “a newborn baby is not a picture of confidence”. Yet somehow as they all kvetch – that glorious Yiddish word for complainting – nobody admits they might be the ones doing the persecuting. Back of the net, Miller! a message for today.
Another great line: Harry studied in Germany and loves its art and music, and his own delusion is believing that this Nazism cannot last. Challenged about everyone being persecuted he remarks that Hitler feels it, and is a top kvetcher himself: “He has turned his whole beautiful country into one gigantic kvetch”.
For that line. everything is forgiven. Thank Arthur Miller for that insight.
youngvic.org to 18th April
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