At the Eclipse Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall” is a deeply flawed play, but in the hands of the right director and actors it still is an engrossing, if long, evening of theater. And thus it comes to pass that the Eclipse Theatre has turned this problematical work into one of the highlights of the season.

Miller drew wildly divergent reviews for “After the Fall” when it first opened in 1964, including some savagely vitriolic attacks. The drama is an intensely personal, obviously autobiographical work in which Miller the skilled dramatist is often at odds with Miller the man who needs to bare his soul, at excessive and self indulgent length.

The story centers on a 40-something lawyer named Quentin. In Miller’s stage directions, “The action takes place in the mind, thought and memory of Quentin.” Characters move on and off the stage, appearing and departing and as Quentin reviews his troubled life. The chronology is fractured, though the narrative isn’t difficult to follow once the audience digests the identities of the large number of men and women who occupy important, if sometimes ambiguous, places in Quentin’s mind.

        Quentin looks back on his life with tortured feelings of guilt. He reviews his troubled relationships with women, including his two wives. He also philosophizes over love, responsibility, and the meaning of life, or at least his life. The concentration camps of the Holocaust are a metaphor for the burden of guilt he carries.

        The chief flaw in the play is Quentin’s tendency to deliver pretentious and portentous monologue that analyze his sense of insecurity, moral confusion, and, again and again, his guilt. I could never isolate just what was eating the man. The play is partly Quentin’s confessional but I never figured out for sure what he was confessing to, or why he felt the need to bare his vulnerability and feelings of inadequacy at such length.

        So when Quentin delivers his mea culpa monologues the play tends to founder. Fortunately, much of the play breaks down into a series of vivid confrontations and discussions that grab the spectator theatrically and dramatically. Some scenes vividly portray the damage inflicted on innocent people by the communist witch hunts conducted by publicity seeking congressmen during the McCarthy era. There are absorbing confrontations between Quentin and Louise, his first life, evoking a marriage on the way to the rocks because the husband and wife cannot communicate emotionally.

        The second act tends to bog down in a detailed examination of Quentin’s self-destructive wife Maggie (an obvious stand-in for Marilyn Monroe), and her disintegration through self-hatred and an unfulfilled yearning for love. This is the portion of the play that aroused so much sound and fury in 1964. Today, nearly 50 years after Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, the act doesn’t retain nearly as much of its voyeur element, but it does allow Nora Fiffer to radiate one of the performances of the year as she portrays Maggie’s irreversible downward spiral.

        I caught the Eclipse revival near the end of its successful run at the Greenhouse Theater Center. The production was still in superb shape, with the large cast of 15 performing with commitment and professionalism. The staging is another gold star on the record of so-called storefront theaters and a further testimony to the astonishing depth of quality acting in Chicagoland theater.

        The obvious star of the play is Quentin, played with assurance and intelligence by Nathaniel Swift. My only quibble is that Swift seems a bit too young for the role, but otherwise he nails the character. Swift can’t do much to improve the florid and wordy monologues but in Quentin’s interaction with his parents, friends, and the women in his life, Swift is terrific.

The production runs 2 hours and 45 minutes including a short intermission, and a large percent of that time belongs to Quentin. It’s a physically demanding role beyond its emotional and psychological requirements and Swift comes up big from first scene to last.

The cast that supports Swift and Fiffer is impressive. That includes Jerry Bloom and Susan Monts-Bologna as Quentin’s German immigrant parents, Joe McCauley as his brother, Margaret Grace as still another woman who loves Quentin passionately, Nina O’Keefe as Louise, Sally Eames-Harlan as Quentin’s perhaps final romantic interest, Eustace Allen (particularly effective as a victim of the communist hysteria), and Eric Leonard as a man who names names to the congressional committee.  Ensemble roles are flawlessly supplied by Kate Brown, Kevin Kenneally, Robert L. Oakes, and Chad Ramsey.

        The behind-the-scenes hero is director Stephen Scott. He orchestrates the staging to give the memory flow clarity and a natural sense of inevitability. It’s a long play but Scott’s command of the action and characters never allows the evening to drag, notwithstanding Quentin’s lapses into anguished blarney.

        The designers serve the production well. Kevin Hagen populates the small playing area with boxes at various levels, against a backdrop of photos of Jews lost in the Holocaust’s concentration camps. Michael McNamara’s lighting effectively sets the moods and tracks the action. Rachel Lambert designed the costumes and Cecil Averett the sound. Visually and aurally, this is a first rate production.

        “After the Fall” runs through August 22 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.eclipsetheater.com.

The show gets a rating of four stars.    August 2010

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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