Broken Glass
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Broken Glass is the 80-year-old Miller’s latest opus, a bold effort to reclaim his role as social conscience of the American theater: this is the playwright at his most didactic. Admittedly the script is powerful and heartfelt, Miller’s most skillful writing in decades. But that’s not saying much, given that during the last 25 years or so Miller has churned out hackneyed drivel on the order of The Creation of the World and Other Business and the incoherent film script for Everybody Wins. This effort may indeed signal Miller’s return to writing thought-provoking plays, but Broken Glass assuredly is not the return to form that some critics have called it. In virtually every passage one hears Miller’s strident voice, struggling to express something that used to come naturally.
Set in Brooklyn in 1938, around the time of Kristallnacht in Germany, Broken Glass concerns physical and emotional paralysis in the face of unspeakable cruelty. At the center of the play are Phillip Gellburg, a self-loathing Jewish businessman who’s made every effort to deny his heritage, and his miserable wife Sylvia, who’s become paralyzed from the waist down after reading stories of Nazi atrocities in the New York Times. Ostensibly about Sylvia’s attempts to overcome her psychosomatic disability and the psychological effects of the rise of Nazism, Broken Glass also addresses the smaller, more private emotional holocausts that occur in families.
National Jewish Theater, under the deft direction of Susan Padveen, does a stunning job of inflating even the flattest of Miller’s speeches. All the performers are highly competent professionals, but Lisa Dodson’s fiercely sympathetic take on the emotionally and physically crippled Sylvia is especially intelligent, moving, and believable. But perhaps the best performances are those by cellists Ingrid Krizan and Lucy Nelson, whose doleful incidental music speaks more precisely to the issues of desperation and emotional alienation than virtually anything in Miller’s script.
