The Price Opens at the Madison Rep

Kenneth Burns:

But Corley says the play is both personal and political, and that the current political climate makes The Price as relevant as ever.

In The Price, one of the brothers, Victor (played by Roderick Peeples), is a retired policeman who gave up a budding scientific career to care for his ailing father. The other brother, Walter (Richard Henzel), is a wealthy surgeon who has given their father only token support.

The play’s political themes emerge, Corley says, as the brothers try to make sense of their past and of their choices — and of the prices they have paid. “When Miller wrote the play, he wanted to write about the ideology that created the Vietnam War,” Corley says, “and the belief that the end of war could make things better. Both fallacies are based on a misunderstanding of the past.”