On a mission to present the plays of Arthur Miller over a period of several years, Actors Workshop Theatre this month is staging his 1994 drama, “Broken Glass.”
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This is late Miller, bogged down a bit by a debate format over moral, social and sexual issues; but it still contains solid proof of the old master’s storytelling ability.
The beleaguered hero of the drama, set in New York in the late 1930s, is Phillip Gellburg, a rigid, frigid mortgage banker, trying to deal with his wife, Sylvia’s, unexpected, apparently inexplicable paralysis from her waist down.
He turns in desperation to Dr. Harry Hyman, a sympathetic, intelligent physician who, after questioning Gellburg at length, determines that Sylvia’s condition, accompanied by her obsession with reading news accounts of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany, has its roots in her husband’s lack of sexual energy and in his self-loathing at being a Jew.
Trying to alleviate the wife’s condition, the doctor becomes attracted to her, which leads to further psychological complications — and a supercharged climax in which the husband and wife finally try to get together.
The play is being presented in the Victory Gardens First Floor Studio.The actors sometimes dally in the ruminations of an actor’s workshop, instead of getting on with it in the more tightly paced way of a play in performance.
However, Michael Colucci, the director, who also takes the role of Dr. Hyman, has put some interesting portrayals on the stage.
Marjorie Bransfield is troubled and tempting as the attractive, zaftig Sylvia, and Philip Wasik is appropriately heinous as the banker’s boss, who offhandedly refers to Gellburg and all Jews as “you people.”
David Wesley Cooper, an inexperienced actor who nonetheless has the bit in his teeth for this role, portrays Gellburg with his whole body clenched in misery and frustration.
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Broken Glass plays at the Victory Gardens Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., through Sept. 30. Box office: 773-871-3000. Tickets: $22.