ROUNDABOUT BLOG

Set model for Arthur Miller's THE PRICE

DEREK MCLANE — SET DESIGN
The Price takes in the late 1960s and, interestingly, Arthur Miller said that this play was his response to the Vietnam War. The setting is located in an attic apartment in an Upper West Side brownstone that is going to be torn down so that new high rises can be built. It is where the father of Victor and Walter used to live. The house now contains an enormous furniture collection. The furniture collection comes from the early 1900s, and the story of the play centers around the value of this furniture collection, so we have to see it. Victor wants to sell the furniture, and a big chunk of the play is the negotiation for the price of this furniture. What’s interesting about the furniture collection is what the furniture dealer, Solomon, says about it -- that it’s out of date. It’s actually not worth that much. Victor and his wife, Esther, think the furniture is worth a huge amount of money, but in fact it’s outdated because of its scale. It’s too big for most modern apartments. The value of the furniture also speaks to the feeling of an end of era in this play. I wanted to give the audience the sense of the attic being at the very top of the house and how that relates to the surrounding skyline of an older New York City neighborhood. There are no walls to this attic. There’s a roof and a floor and the roof floats over the floor. The audience sees other rooftops from the surrounding buildings as well as the sky. I tried to create an exaggerated sense of height, so the audience will get the feeling of a precipice. I wanted the audience to be aware subliminally that things are about to change. It’s not a literal set at all, but it has all the things that are called for in the text. It has stairs coming up from below, and it has the furniture that’s referred to in the story, but it’s opened up in a way that gives it a larger — and perhaps more poetic — meaning.

SARAH HOLDEN — COSTUME DESIGN

Costume renderings for Arthur Miller's THE PRICE

When I first read The Price, I was struck by the deep and complicated relationships among these four people. Although the play takes place over just a few hours on one day, it is infused with a much larger history—the history between two brothers and between a husband and wife combined with the literal history of a lifetime accumulation of furniture, possessions, and memories. The history that gets in the way of them being able to talk honestly and openly with each other. Even Solomon, the one character who is unknown to the other three, comes in with his own messy and tangled human story. Designing costumes for The Price began with getting to know these four characters. Talking with director Terry Kinney about who they are, how they relate to each other, and what the stakes are for each of them on this day. The next step was diving into the research. Finding their world by reading plenty of magazines from the late ‘60s, searching through catalogues and learning everything I could about the NYPD uniforms circa 1968. For me, the most interesting challenge was making sure these characters onstage simply look like real people wearing real clothes. This involved talking to each actor and beginning that collaboration, which continues through the fitting process and all the way to the costumes onstage. If I did my job well, the audience will forget about the costumes and just see Victor, Esther, Walter, and Solomon, who have met up in an attic apartment on this day bringing with them both their histories and their hopes.

DAVID WEINER — LIGHTING DESIGN
I am completely thrilled to be designing the lighting for Arthur Miller’s The Price. What makes this opportunity so compelling for me is how Miller masterfully renders a landscape of memory within the literal landscape of Victor and Walter’s familial past — their childhood attic, littered with relics that bring painful memories into sharp focus. My challenge is to use the lighting to render a visual world that enhances Miller’s writing with the same sense of dramatic poetry. Derek McLane has designed a stunning deconstructed attic in which the outside world bleeds into the inside. They are both separate and one. We are surrounded by the skyline of late 1960s New York, where the play takes place over a couple of continuous hours one fall evening. By using time of day as a mechanism for delivering light into the space — a giant sculpture comprised of assembled furniture pieces — I hope to illustrate and sharpen the emotional journey that the two brothers make during their reunion after being long estranged. As Miller unravels their relationship in front of us, we will descend through sunset into night penetrating the attic with the light of waning sun and moonlight. Shafts of light will carve up Derek’s attic sculpture, bringing specific relics of Victor and Walter’s past into focus to help illustrate their emotional journey – a harp, their father’s chair, an armoire filled with their mother’s gowns, an old Victrola. The trick will be for the lighting to enhance the storytelling in a subliminal way, so that the audience is never aware that their attention is being directed by the light even though it is.

JESSE TABISH — ORIGINAL MUSIC
I was familiar with other Arthur Miller plays, but, to be honest, I had never heard of The Price. I was immediately engaged and found it deeply human. It's deceiving at first because of the simple, plain talk and domestic setting — but, as the play unfolds, the characters start to unearth themselves as they recall their own versions of the past. A creeping tension builds and builds. There's no big bam ending, which I loved. Real life stuff. The research I did in order to compose music was looking up old interviews of Arthur Miller where he talks about life and his work. I even tried sneaking some of that audio into the music! Not sure if it will make the cut though. Initially I had written several pieces that in retrospect came off as too gloomy/dramatic/ sad. After talking with Terry Kinney, the director, we realized that there was much more love and lightness in the play. So, for me the challenge composing this score became balancing tension and human fragility without coming across too epic or sad. I hope I have achieved this. I'm so honored to be a small part apart of this production with its amazing cast, crew, and director.

ROB MILBURN AND MICHAEL BODEEN — SOUND DESIGN
During discussions with our director, Terry Kinney, he described the aural landscape of The Price as subtle, spare, super real, and dreamlike. The play embraces both the joy and unreliability of memory. There are also two key aural moments in it that are written in the stage directions by Miller and are the first sounds we hear in the play, even before we hear an actor speak. The first one is the plucking of a single harp string by Victor, creating a heavenly, light sound that resonates against all the large old furniture stacked in a dark attic. The second thing we hear is a record on a wind-up Victrola. The needle is dropped onto a slightly scratchy record. The song is an upbeat and happy vaudevillian tune sung in a back and forth manner by two male singers. We immediately have a sense of nostalgia of a happier time. It connects to this attic of memory again in a contrasting way -- light and upbeat versus dark and solemn -- but now there are two voices. The first record is almost immediately replaced by a second, where we hear a trumpet, then a woman laughing, then a man laughing. They laugh hysterically. It's a cacophonous trio. It is a surreal moment, as if in a dream, a memory of past good times but skewed by the strangeness of the voices we hear from the Victrola. Derek McLane's beautiful set includes a skyline of the Upper West Side in the late 1960s that surrounds the attic. The spare sounds of the outside world will reinforce David Weiner's lighting gestures, and the subtle use of composed music by Jesse Tabish will float through the space like a distant memory.

Arthur Miller's The Price is now playing at the American Airlines Theatre. Visit our website for tickets and more information.