They [the Franz brothers] think they have achieved the indifference to the betrayals of the past that maturity confers. But it all comes back; the old angry symbols evoke the old emotions of injustice, and they part unreconciled … doomed to perpetuate [their] illusions because truth was too costly to face. (Miller 1987, 542)
Yet despite this perceived pessimism, Miller remarks of his work generally that “my resistance to despair seems to have something Jewish about it … a ray of light has to remain after darkness has closed in, a glow of redemption must appear” (Miller 1987, xv).
This “glow of redemption,” however subtle, distinguishes Miller’s work from that of later American dramatists such as David Mamet and Sam Shepard, whose plays often seem more recalcitrant and unforgiving. Yet Miller’s The Price evinces intriguing parallels with works by these two iconic postmodern dramatists.
Examining The Price alongside Mamet’s American Buffalo (1975) reveals thematic parallels that highlight the arbitrary and imaginary nature of monetary value. By incorporating economic theories of Slavoj Žižek, this essay analyzes Miller’s portrait of the Franz family heirlooms as a type of “junk shop” comparable to the setting of American Buffalo; moreover, the characters in both plays exhibit anxiety over the prospect of being taken advantage of by a subjective or otherwise arbitrary appraiser who can assign or repudiate the monetary value of material objects.
In addition, The Price and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss (2000) depict brothers who are traumatized subjects resulting from a father’s deficiencies. Borrowing from trauma studies, this essay analyzes how and why both sets of estranged brothers provide conflicting accounts of a dysfunctional father. An examination of these parallels reveals The Price to be a harbinger of postmodern dramatic themes employed by Mamet and Shepard.
The Price and Mamet’s American Buffalo: Money as Metaphor
Both David Mamet and the late Sam Shepard greatly admired Miller’s work. Shepard agreed to be one of the featured celebrity readers at a Broadway gala on January 25, 2016, commemorating the centennial of Miller’s birth.1 In David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre, Ira Nadal describes Miller as an acknowledged influence on Mamet’s work, even a “touchstone” (36). Although Christopher Bigsby notes that “Mamet has attacked Miller for failing to identify the characters of Death of a Salesman as being Jewish,” Mamet’s relationship with Miller was both professional and personal (33). Mamet spoke at Miller’s 80th birthday celebration in 1995, and following the playwright’s death nearly a decade later, penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times, describing the extraordinary empathy elicited by Miller’s unforgettable characters: “We pity them as they are powerless to escape their fate. We feel fear because we recognize, in them, our own dilemmas” (Mamet 2005, n.p.).
One of the dilemmas facing Victor Franz in The Price is deciding how to assess the value of the legacy left him by his deceased father; is it junk or is it valuable? This legacy is two-dimensional: the physical objects left behind to which monetary value may be assigned and the emotional and psychological legacy of memories with their concomitant guilt. When elder brother Walter Franz enters, he almost immediately dismisses their father’s furniture as the “same old junk,” a remark that appraiser Gregory Solomon later turns against him as they haggle over price (Miller 1968, 223). Walter attempts to defend himself by explaining, “When you’ve been brought up with things, you tend to be sick of them” (Miller 1968, 230); with possessions, as with relationships, familiarity often breeds contempt. In an earlier play, Incident at Vichy, Lebeau evinces a similar sentiment when explaining how his mother’s clinging obstinately to her material possessions caused them to remain in Paris even as the Nazis invaded: “Suddenly my mother wouldn’t leave the furniture … She had this brass bed, and carpets, and draperies and all kinds of junk” (Miller 1964, 136, 168). Walter’s repudiation of his father’s material legacy—he explains to Victor that he “didn’t want anything” (Miller 1968, 223)—mirrors his abandonment of their father twenty-eight years earlier. In an essay entitled “Objects, Objects Everywhere,” economics philosopher Slavoj Žižek employs the phrase “inherent transgression” to describe one who, like Walter, attempts to eschew or otherwise declines to participate in a commercial exchange or other socially contractual exercise. “Inherent transgression” refers to the decision of one who “does not take ideological injunctions seriously. He mocks them, dismisses them cynically, but this very resistance is in advance taken into account and serves the reproduction of the ideological edifice” (Žižek 2016, 182). Despite his insistence to the contrary, Walter does want something: he needs understanding and perhaps forgiveness from Victor, so the furniture that Solomon has appraised becomes a symbol—what Marx and Žižek refer to as “commodity fetishism”—for Walter’s relationships with his father and brother.
the real problem is not to penetrate to the “hidden kernel” of the commodity—the determination of its value by the quantity of the work consumed in its production—but to explain why work assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social character only in the commodity-form of its product. (Žižek 1989, 11)
Actually, the brothers have not reunited in their childhood home merely to transact a furniture sale but rather to renegotiate and assess their relationships with their dead father and with each other. Thus, the commodity (furniture and the money assigned as its price or value) reveals the underlying relationships that the furniture represents: “in the structure of the commodity-form it is possible to find the transcendental subject” (Žižek 1989, 16). In other words, through his haggling with appraiser Gregory Solomon, Victor may discover how he himself values his memory of his father. Walter, through his “inherent transgression,” attempts to repudiate this process of social–relational discovery, although it may be argued that his attempts are not altogether successful since he does become entangled in animated discussions regarding their parents. Furthermore, Walter eventually suggests a tax deduction scheme in order for both Franz brothers to earn the maximum profit from their father’s estate, affirming Žižek’s observation that the “inherent transgression” turns against itself and inevitably “serves the reproduction of the ideological edifice”—in this case, capitalism. Indeed, for all his denunciation of his father, Walter cannot help but notice similarities between them: “my own apartment is so loaded up it doesn’t look too different from this” (Miller 1968, 236).
For his part, Victor has “gotten to look a great deal like Dad” (Miller 1968, 225). Early in his negotiating with Solomon, Victor delivers his ultimatum regarding the ten rooms of his parents’ furniture—“All or nothing or let’s forget it” (Miller 1968, 208)—which may imply a subconscious desire for a sense of closure with his father’s legacy. This is Victor’s opportunity either to reconcile or to exorcize his conflicting emotions toward his father once and for all. When Solomon offers Victor eleven hundred dollars for the entire lot of furniture, we have no idea whether this is a fair offer. In Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard Thaler, 2017 Nobel Laureate in Economics, observes “There is clear evidence that people dislike unfair offers and are willing to take a financial hit to punish those who make [these unfair offers]. It is less clear that people feel morally obliged to make fair offers” (Thaler 2015, n.p.).
Money is in reality just an embodiment, a condensation, a materialization of a network of social relations … but to the individuals themselves, this function of money … appears as an immediate, natural property of a thing called ‘money’, as if money is already in itself, in its immediate material reality, the embodiment of wealth … When individuals use money, they know very well that there is nothing magical about it—that money, in its materiality, is simply an expression of social relations. (Žižek 1989, 31)
Esther is not to be blamed for her blind faith in the fetishistic illusion that seduces us all and is the de facto basis for human commerce and labor. Victor admits as much to Solomon: “… it all ends up she wants, she wants. And I can’t really blame her—there’s just no respect for anything but money.” Yet Victor claims for himself a privileged distinction as one capable of resisting cupidity: “I just don’t want to lay down my life for it [money]” (Miller 1968, 218), implying that Esther would lay down her life for money if she could and that his brother Walter already has done so.
You can’t walk in with one splash and wash out twenty-eight years. There’s a price people pay. I’ve paid it, it’s all gone, I haven’t got it anymore. Just like you paid, didn’t you? You’ve got no wife, you’ve lost your family …. (Miller 1968, 253)
“It” here refers to the price Victor paid—living in poverty with his father rather than abandoning him, “eating garbage,” and remaining on perpetual suicide watch. Victor implies that Walter’s family tragedies, which have left him emotionally bereft, were the just and appropriate consequences of Walter’s selfish decision, and that Walter’s abandonment of their father was a harbinger of his later estrangement from his wife and children.
Commodified Relationships in The Price and American Buffalo
By 1975 when Mamet’s American Buffalo appeared, the frenetic cultural upheavals of the 1960s had left many Americans unmoored from traditional family and social paradigms. Mamet’s play emphasizes this more pronounced cultural estrangement, including an examination of the arbitrary and futile exercise of trying to re-envision personal relationships as economic transactions.
The play takes place inside a “junk shop” where sundry items, sometimes stolen, are sold. The play’s title alludes not only to a valuable buffalo nickel but also (as a verb) to confusing or misleading someone—specifically, in this play, during a monetary transaction. Mamet’s “property list” for the play calls for a “Nickel wrapped in cloth” and a “Coin reference book,” not necessarily a buffalo nickel, but any nondescript nickel, and not a coin reference book of any particular authenticity or legitimacy, but any coin book (Mamet 1975, 85). These circumstantial details become prescient when examined in light of Žižek’s observations about the arbitrary and illusory nature of money exchange. Not only is the exchange of artifacts for money symbolic of the underlying social relations between the individuals engaging in the transaction, but furthermore “the transcendental subject … is confronted with the disquieting fact that it [the exchange] depends on some inner-worldly ‘pathological’ process—a scandal, a nonsensical impossibility” (Žižek 1989, 17).
American Buffalo utilizes three main characters—Donny Dubrow, the junk shop proprietor; Bob, his drug-addicted protégé (“gopher”), and Walter Cole better known as “Teach,” who is a friend of Donny and a veteran criminal. In their attempts to justify the “scandal” and “nonsensical impossibility” of money exchange, the characters use familiar and comfortable definitions which affirm the social–relational aspect of commerce: Donny insists, “That’s all business is … common sense, experience, and talent” as well as “People taking care of themselves” (Mamet 1975, 8). These innocuous phrases naively imply that almost anyone is capable of assessing intrinsic value and turning a profit from a transaction. Moreover, Donny and Teach portray themselves as astute appraisers of value, but only if they are able to scrutinize various objects visually. Donny explains, “I got to look at it to know do I want it” (seeing is believing); Teach concurs, “Any business … You want it run right, be there” (Mamet 1975, 22). Yet the men’s earlier statements contradict these claims of pecuniary expertise, as when Teach laments his previous inability to assess competently the monetary value of things: “If I kept the stuff that I threw out … I would be a wealthy man today” (Mamet 1975, 18). This statement implies, of course, that Teach has since developed the acumen to evaluate and negotiate fair market value.
In Miller’s The Price, Victor’s negotiations with Solomon (such as they are) likewise presume that Victor is able to determine whether or not Solomon is making a fair offer for his father’s estate. Furthermore, both plays allude—directly or indirectly—to the possibility of a son profiting from his father’s possessions. In American Buffalo, Teach regrets not recognizing the monetary value of “Shit my father used to keep in his desk drawer,” and Don affirms, “My Father, too” (Mamet 1975, 18). For these men, an opportunity was missed, gone forever, with nothing patrimonial ever gained for themselves.
But Victor Franz will not leave empty-handed from his transaction with Solomon. The most obvious difference, economically speaking, is that Victor has goods-in-hand with which to negotiate, whereas Teach and Donny in Mamet’s play have only a hope of scoring a coin collection in a robbery that never comes to fruition. This distinction is crucial, for Donny intends to rely on two special circumstances when determining the value of the stolen coins, should he ever obtain them. First, he plans to solicit the opinions of prospective buyers as he did when the “man with the suitcase” initially expressed interest in a buffalo nickel. “You tell me,” Donny replied when the man asked him how much he wanted for the nickel, and Teach affirms that this technique is “Always good business” (Mamet 1975, 25). Secondly, Donny relies on the purported expertise of the coin reference book which he keeps nearby. Donny explains to Bob that the book is “an indicator” which “gives us ideas … The book gives us a basis for comparison” (Mamet 1975, 48). In fact, the coin reference book becomes “fetishized” like the coins themselves, offering an illusion of infallibility and security. Žižek observes that even when participants in money exchange “no longer believe” in the “scandal” that is taking place, “the things themselves believe for them” (emphasis in original); that is to say, commodities “believe in their place” in social relations (Žižek 1989, 32). Nevertheless, the coin reference book, like money itself, remains subordinate to the social–relational dynamic as Donny admits—“Look, we’re human beings. We can talk, we can negotiate” (Mamet 1975, 49). Indeed, the term “negotiate” alludes not only to haggling over an elusive price but also to the participants’ intricate emotive and intuitive maneuverings during the transaction. These negotiations through the human psyche, especially involving repressed traumatic memories, link The Price to the postmodern drama of Sam Shepard.
The Price and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss: Sons Struggling with Trauma
Miller has remarked that “The Price grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past” (Miller 2016, 293); indeed, “the rich heaviness” and “weight of time” (Miller 1968, 187) described in Miller’s opening stage directions are applicable not only to the furniture onstage but to innumerable unresolved issues between father and sons, brother and brother. Any hope of remediating these issues is fraught with obstacles. Susan Abbotson observes that Miller “simultaneously hated and admired his father; he was annoyed at Isidore’s incapacity to fully recuperate, economically and emotionally, from the Depression, yet he was able to recognize the man’s inner goodness … as he watched his father become increasingly useless as a provider” (Abbotson 2007, 3). In plays such as No Villain, Honors at Dawn, The Man Who Had All the Luck, All My Sons, and of course Death of a Salesman, Miller depicts various conflicts between a father and sons.
Likewise, Sam Shepard’s relationship with his own father was ambivalent at best, and although he changed his name from Sam Shepard Rogers in an attempt to escape the curse of his father’s hard-drinking, violent legacy (a common theme in Shepard’s work), his plays inevitably depict paternal figures who resemble Shepard’s own father. The power of the past is ubiquitous throughout Shepard’s work, and one might conclude after reading some of his most important plays—among them Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, and Curse of the Starving Class—that Shepard’s dramatic formula is to conjure a haunting memory of an inadequate father, add an angst-ridden son, or two brothers embroiled in a state of perpetual conflict, mix in liberal doses of alcohol, and see what unfolds. More often than not in Shepard’s plays, past events are misremembered or repudiated, though the truth eventually and inexorably claws its way to the surface in wrenching and often violent epiphanies.
The Late Henry Moss is perhaps the quintessential Shepard family drama in this regard. Within the confines of their dead father’s trailer in the New Mexico desert, brothers Earl and Ray Moss lurch erratically through bouts of violence and mutual accusation as they struggle to cope with a traumatic event from the past precipitated by their father’s abuse. Based on the Moss brothers’ memory of that fateful, violent night thirty years earlier, Earl would seem to be in his forties, and Ray in his late thirties. Both brothers are loners, neither having married nor fathered children. They are determined to learn all they can about Henry’s death, not from filial affection but because they feel cheated that their father died before they could demand a reckoning for his past abuse. Younger son Ray, in particular, seems slighted and angry that he was not present when Henry died, and his obsession with clearing his conscience concerning his father parallels younger son Victor Franz in Miller’s play. Though the Franz brothers remain sober and abstain from violence, they share with the Moss brothers the difficulty of accurately remembering the past and fairly assessing their father’s legacy.
In both plays, paternal decisions have led to disaster, resulting in the sons’ suffering a traumatic experience which “shatters or disables the individual’s cognitive and perceptual capacities so that the experience never becomes part of the ordinary memory system” (Leys 2000, 298). In The Price, the traumatic experience and subsequent repressed memory concern their formerly successful father losing the family fortune. Whether this disaster resulted from reckless financial speculation or was the hapless result of forces beyond the father’s control, we never can be certain. At any rate, Mr. Franz shouldered the blame and the shame for the family’s financial collapse, leading to Victor’s decision to offer financial support for their father in his later years. In The Late Henry Moss, the titular father’s failures are much more chronic, intentional, and sinister, including battering his wife and terrorizing his children during drunken rages.
In both plays, the brothers’ memories of their respective fathers and of past family traumas differ significantly. Walter Franz’s memories seem more vivid and complete than Victor’s. “How do you remember all this stuff?” Victor asks Walter. In response, Walter expresses surprise that Victor has so effectively repressed these memories: “Why not? Don’t you?” (Miller 1968, 237). Perhaps Walter’s decision to flee the home twenty-eight years earlier allowed freedom for his memories to coalesce while Victor remains conflicted about his own decision to stay by their father. Walter recalls their father’s “selfishness – which was perfectly normal – was always obvious to me, but you never seemed to notice it” (Miller 1968, 251). Walter’s observation is an indictment—however subtle—of Victor’s naiveté regarding their father. Victor remembers their father more sympathetically as “a beaten dog, ashamed to walk in the street” (Miller 1968, 258). Following Isidore Miller’s similar financial ruin, the playwright remembered how his older brother Kermit was “busy mobilizing himself [in order] to save our father, whom he had romanticized into a fallen giant,” with Kermit assuming the role of dutiful son similar to Victor Franz (Miller 1987, 116).
In the midst of his spirited defense of his father’s memory, Victor soon discovers he is pitted not only against his brother but against his wife, Esther, as well. When Walter insists that their father was “a calculating liar” who “exploited” Victor’s filial sympathy, Esther affirms this view by labeling her father-in-law a “miserable cheap manipulator” whose missteps contributed in no small way to her own financial mediocrity (Miller 1968, 258–59). Esther’s self-awareness—“I want money”—demands a reckoning with some culpable external cause, leading her to excoriate her father-in-law.
In the face of this dual opposition, Victor’s tone shifts from combative to confessional as he allows himself to remember a particularly painful moment with his father: his father’s laughter when Victor asked him for money for college. Victor admits, “I don’t think a week has gone by that I haven’t seen that laugh” (Miller 1968, 259). Victor’s use of “seen” rather than “heard” when describing his father’s laughter implies an image seared into his psyche, rather than a derisive echo reverberating perpetually in memory. Victor’s imagistic language points to his father’s vivid renunciation of his willingness to help his younger son at this critical juncture.
Victor’s “seeing” his father’s laughter continually may illuminate the significance of the moment near the beginning of the play when Victor selects the laughing record from his father’s collection and listens to it in a type of subconscious pantomime of that fateful moment with his father. Cathy Caruth observes, “because the individual cannot [accurately] recall the original traumatic event, [s]he is fated to act it out or in other ways imitate it” (qtd. in Leys 2000, 298). As he listens to the record, Victor is described in phrases that may be interpreted as depicting his abject powerlessness in the face of this overwhelming traumatic memory: “Now he bends over with laughter, taking an unsteady step as helplessness rises in him” (Miller 1968, 188). When viewed through the lens of trauma studies, the bent-over helplessness of this moment—suggesting an almost fetal posture—finds its origins in the traumatic moment precipitated by his father’s laughter. In addition, this posture of abjection parallels Victor’s succinct explanation to Solomon of his father’s dilemma following his financial failure, “Some men don’t bounce” (Miller 1968, 216). Ironically, Victor fails to recognize that he himself has also failed to “bounce” back from the traumatic experiences he has suffered, as evidenced by the memory of his father’s laughter, which continues to haunt—and taunt—him.
Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss alludes to the intersection of trauma and memory in the play’s opening line as Earl Moss tells his younger brother, “Well, you know me, Ray—I was never one to live in the past,” a claim which soon proves to be specious. Ray’s response—“I remember you leaving. That’s all I remember” (Shepard 2002, 6–7)—criticizes Earl’s decision to abandon the family, similar to Victor Franz’s indictment of Walter’s departure. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman describes how “people who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy” (1). Ray employs precisely this type of fractured narrative when attempting to recall repressed memories of the “big blowout” which is “still very vivid with me. Like it happened yesterday,” but he can express himself only through staccato utterances—“Explosions. Screaming. Smoke. The telephone” (Shepard 2002, 8). Earl casually shrugs off these memories by telling Ray, “Things get embellished over the years” and “You shouldn’t let that stuff haunt you, Ray” (Shepard 2002, 8). Similarly, Walter Franz dismisses Victor’s version of the past: “It’s a fantasy, Victor. Your father was penniless and your brother a son of a bitch, and you play no part at all” (Miller 1968, 257). In The Price, the audience—as well as Victor himself—is left wondering whether Walter may be telling the truth. In The Late Henry Moss, however, Earl’s guilt is confirmed not only by Ray but by the ghost of their dead father.
Miller has observed in his autobiography Timebends, “whenever the hand of the distant past reaches out of its grave, it is always somehow absurd as well as amazing” (Miller 1987, 134–35). The hand of the past manifests itself in Shepard’s play when Ray counters Earl with eyewitness testimony of the night decades earlier when he [Ray] last saw his brother and father: “I’m your witness. I’m your little brother. I saw you, Earl. I saw the whole thing! I saw you run! …” (Shepard 2002, 45). This memory, at least, has not been repressed; it is indelible: “Things like that you don’t forget. They mark time. For me they do” (Shepard 2002, 9). Then, in a more “amazing” and, perhaps, “absurd” development, their father Henry Moss revives momentarily from beneath the sheet where he has lain dead for most of the play in order to confront Earl: “You could have stopped me then but you didn’t” (Shepard 2002, 112). On the night in question, Henry nearly beat his wife to death and Earl, rather than protecting his mother, fled the home in fear, never to return. Earl initially denies his father’s accusations: “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”, but eventually he admits, “I was—just—too—scared” (Shepard 2002, 113). Henry is astounded at this revelation, and his final words are a question—“You were scared of a dead man?” (Shepard 2002, 113). Significantly, Henry’s resurrection allows him to speak only with his firstborn son, Earl, while Ray observes silently from the periphery. Under these circumstances, this scene may be construed as a facet of the brothers’ traumatized psyches and their need for closure after so many years.
It was right on this couch. She was all dressed up—for some affair, I think. Her hair was piled up, and long earrings? And he had his tuxedo on … and made us all sit down; and he told us it was all gone. And she vomited. All over his arms. His hands. Just kept on vomiting, like thirty-five years coming up. And he sat there. Stinking like a sewer. And a look came onto his face. (Miller 1968, 260)
Walter, a medical doctor, acknowledges his brother’s repression of this memory—“you proceeded to wipe out what you saw” (Miller 1968, 261). At the same time, Walter asserts his own ability to relinquish the past and move beyond it, “he [their father] doesn’t follow me any more with that vomit on his hands” (Miller 1968, 261). If trauma may be accurately described as a “shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time” (Caruth 1996, 61), then Victor continues to be haunted by this image imprinted on his psyche, whereas Walter claims he has managed either to overcome this memory or to reconcile it somehow. In fact, Walter’s reference to his business venture of investing in nursing homes—“Helpless, desperate children trying to dump their parents” (Miller 1968, 241)—may be read as a subconscious allusion to his repressed guilt over abandoning their father all those years ago. Moreover, despite Walter’s insistence that he has moved on from the past, in fact he later suffered a complete mental breakdown and needed three years to return to functionality: “there’s one virtue in going nuts … you get to see the terror … the slow, daily fear you call ambition” (Miller 1968, 242). This collapse, which in some ways mirrors his father’s fall from grace, perhaps allowed Walter to exorcize his father’s memory in a way that has eluded Victor up to this point.
In The Late Henry Moss, the memory of their mother likewise serves as a catalyst for the sons’ convoluted feelings of bewilderment, guilt, and shame. Earl remembers his mother fondly as the ideal Cold War-era American housewife, yet we cannot help sensing his incredulity: “She was always faithful. No matter what. I remember her now. I remember her on her hands and knees” (Shepard 2002, 109). At this moment in the play, Henry Moss has been temporarily resurrected, allowing him to interject his own irascible opinions about his wife—“That little shit. Another traitor. Locked me out of my own house” (Shepard 2002, 109)—while failing to admit that she was merely trying to protect herself and her children from her husband’s violence. Earlier in the play, Earl and Ray recalled watching their father kick their mother while she was on the floor on her hands and knees, with her blood flying all over the kitchen floor. Now, Ray re-enacts this scene by kicking Earl repeatedly across the kitchen floor of their father’s trailer. In doing so, Ray releases years of repressed anger over his brother’s cowardly refusal to protect their mother: “I thought Earl’s gonna stand up for her… Earl’s gonna stop him somehow” (Shepard 2002, 99). Now that Ray has at last been afforded the opportunity to confront Earl about his cowardice, he utters the final line of the play by repeating nearly verbatim the opening line which had previously been spoken by Earl: “You know me, Earl—I was never one to live in the past. That never was my deal” (Shepard 2002, 113). The implication is that Ray may now finally be able to overcome childhood trauma and move forward.
Conclusion
Arthur Miller has opined, “A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse” (Miller 1987, 367). Walter Franz walked away from a challenge twenty-eight years earlier, and despite his statements to the contrary, seems to have been driven by remorse to return to the apartment to face a reckoning with his younger brother. Similarly, Earl Moss faces a reckoning with his younger brother in the New Mexico desert to answer for running away thirty years earlier. Ultimately, Shepard’s ending is characteristically equivocal. In the final scene of his 1978 Pulitzer-Prize winning play Buried Child, a mysterious grandson sits on a sofa contemplating the dubious inheritance he has just received—is it a blessing or a curse? Is he finally home, or is he now trapped forever? Susan Abbotson has noted an “intrinsic optimism” in Miller’s oeuvre versus Shepard’s plays, which are “disturbing studies in entropy” (Abbotson 2002, 300). Nevertheless, Miller’s The Price, it seems to me, ends only slightly less ambiguously than The Late Henry Moss. Walter storms out with “a flicker of a humiliated smile” and wanting to “disappear into air”; Esther “walks out with her life,” whatever that is supposed to mean; and Victor exits after telling Solomon he plans to return for his foil, mask, and gauntlets—symbols of skirmishes yet to be fought, perhaps with Walter on another battleground (Miller 1968, 264–65). Only Solomon may be said to end the play better off than when he began, filled with a new sense of purpose and a zeal for life. He may even have begun to forgive himself for his daughter’s suicide, for as Esther Franz remarks, “It always seems to me that one little step more and some crazy kind of forgiveness will come and lift up everyone” (Miller 1968, 265).
- 1.
Shepard was slated as one of many celebrity readers but was unable to attend, perhaps due to his suffering from ALS. Shepard died on July 27, 2017.
- 2.
Miller’s mother Augusta died in 1961, seven years before The Price was produced, so one may speculate that Mrs. Franz in the play had preceded her husband in death. Describing his mother’s funeral in Timebends, Miller writes, “I wished I had felt freer to acknowledge my love for her … our relation was unfinished” (Miller 1987, 594).