In a New York Times article on April 17 titled “Why Americans Don’t Want to Soak the Rich,” writer Neil Irwin pointed out that “Americans’ desire to soak the rich has diminished even as the rich have more wealth available that could, theoretically, be soaked.”
Is this because we all, in John Steinbeck’s pungent phrase, see ourselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” whose own golden ticket is just waiting to be punched? If so, then a trip to Redtwist Theatre’s revival of “The American Clock: A Vaudeville” by Arthur Miller ought to toss a dash of cold-water reality into one’s face.
Redtwist last staged this 1980 play in 2005 — a few years before our latest Great Recession showed the folly of “tossing the whole country onto a crap table where nobody is ever supposed to lose,” as Arthur Robertson (Brian Parry), a businessman who got out of the market before the 1929 crash, bluntly puts it. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it feels even timelier now, as “class warfare” so often seems to be defined as “not-rich people saying things that hurt the fragile feelings of fantastically wealthy hedge-fund managers.” Perhaps the main difference between 1929 and 2008 is that the bankers and businessmen themselves were on the ledge (literally) back then, with no government bailouts in sight.
As with much of latter-day Miller, “The American Clock” (based in part on Studs Terkel’s oral history “Hard Times”) enjoyed more success in England than in his home country. To be sure, it’s a bit of a clunky construction that unfolds in vignettes that range from gritty domestic drama (think Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty”) to the sort of slice-of-poor-life romanticism sent up by Preston Sturges in “Sullivan’s Travels.”
The Baum family — businessman-turned-salesman Moe (Jeff Gamlin), music-loving Rose (Melonie Collmann) and aspiring sportswriter Lee (a guarded but intense Aaron Kirby) — are obvious stand-ins for Miller’s own family. They get compare-and-contrast treatment with a dispossessed farm family in Iowa and a black hobo (Semaj Miller). There isn’t much here about racial conflict, though Miller also plays the proprietor of a cafe along the Mississippi who tells Kirby’s roving writer “The main thing about this Depression is that it finally hit white people” — something that could explain the rise of Occupy in the wake of the 2008 collapse nearly a century later, since the income disparity between black and white Americans had been apparent long before then.
Interspersed throughout director Jan Ellen Graves’ earnest and full-throated production are period musical numbers, adding the “vaudeville” to the title. The 18-member cast (plus pianist Mark Bowman) mostly commit to the sometimes-obvious dialogue with verve, and the songs provide their own gimlet-eyed paradoxical mix of cynicism and optimism. Life may be just a bowl of cherries, but the people at the bottom are still getting stuck with the pits.
REVIEW: The American Clock: A Vaudeville
3 STARS
Through May 17, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.; $30-$35 at 773-728-7529 or redtwist.org