Word: wifely
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Part of Miller's recent work, Broken Glass treats the long-but feebly-standing marriage bewteen a Jewish couple in 1938 Brooklyn. The wife, Sylvia (Tegan Shohet '01), has psychosomatic paralysis of the legs after seeing daily newspaper photographs of Nazi humiliation of Jews. Husband Phillip (Jesse Kellerman '01) is an anxious, fundamentally confused individual submerged in a WASP business; he approaches any given situation with bullish anxiety...
...undeniable influence and connection with events far afield and how they affect the basic relationship between husband and wife lies at the heart of the work. Atrocity on a national scale is mirrored by emotional aggression on a domestic scale, as Phillip'sa frustration, hostile for all its blindness, seethes at something that can't be explained or denied. Suspicions and confusion arise as if muddled foreign policy with the involvement of an equestrian doctor (Zachary Shrier '99) whose "unconventional" methods include all too casual relations with the patent...
...considering all the tethering going on--husband to wife and self-denial, doctor to patient and duty, etc.--the difficulties of putting into performance such interlacing and interlocking balances and relationships are understandable. Considering the importance of some such connections existing before fragmentation occurs, however, the Kirkland performances become tantalizing in their inevtiably new spin on Miller's Scenario...
Take the doctor. Horse-loving Harry Hyman's always been a hearthrob to the gals but has since settled down with an appropriately braying wife (Rebekah Shoaf '00). Somewhere in him, passion lurks, to even a cautious reading of the play, to the extent that we recognize it lurking even in his cavalier attitude towards cigars. He's a doctor, but some-where his medical training (occurring, to great and ironic controversy, in Germany, because of American quotas) allowed a human weakness to slip...
Louis' is not the only weak will in the play. In sort of parallel plot, a legal clerk named Joe (Geof Oxnard '99) exists in a permanent conflict of ideas and realities. He insists he loves his wife Harper (Jessica Shapiro '01), a fragile agoraphobe with a Valium dependency, but he seems to find plenty of reason not come home on time. He is careerist enough consider a move to Washington, D.C., despite his wife's objections, but also has enough belief in his Mormon ideals as to request that his boss refrain from taking the Lord's name...