This week Arthur Miller’s 1964 play “Incident at Vichy” opened to rave reviews at the Finborough Theater in London. If booking a flight across the pond to see it is inconvenient, however, fortunately for you this timely play can also be seen at the Sloan Theater in Greenfield Community College April 14 through April 22.
As expected, Director and Professor Tom Geha, his students and other local actors have approached their production with energy, creativity and thoughtful, theatrical potency.
Set in 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France but before the full horror of the Nazi agenda was known, “Incident at Vichy” dramatizes the rounding up of 10 French citizens who react to their ominous situation in a variety of ways. As they wait their turn to be questioned, conversation ranges from the common to the profound, touching on questions of identity, culture, humanity and responsibility.
The characters represent different walks of life and social classes, and although Miller wrote the play as an all-male cast, Geha has changed some of the roles to female, the 15-year old boy, for example, now played instead as girl. “The emotional charge of the lines doesn’t change,” however, according to Corinne Epstein, who plays the actress.
Although the 10 detained characters share the vulnerability of their situation, even amongst them biases appear. Sam Harris-Fried says of her character, the gypsy, “I am an outsider amongst outsiders. The others talk at me, but not to me.” Her character was one shifted to be female and apart from that change, Harris-Fried says that the script calls for her to do back flips across the stage. “I’m not going to do that,” she says mysteriously, “but I’m going to do another trick instead.”
Bill Wieliczka (Ferrand the café proprietor) also spoke of “the multiple layers of discrimination and dehumanization” that occur in the play. Parts of his character’s “very extreme emotional arc” were challenging in that his character responds so differently than he himself would, he said.
For him, the dynamic amongst the characters, some justifying what’s happening, others remaining in denial about it, feels emotionally truthful.
Miller’s play begs the question, how long should people have faith in the staying power of normalcy before reacting to what appear to be horrific subversions of it? How long should we trust events and people to continue functioning in predictable ways?
“You don’t just go from 1939 Germany to the height of the Nazi regime,” explains Will Bliss, who plays the German major.
“It happens in lots of little steps, and this play is about one of those steps. Human psychology is to follow the crowd,” he said.
Epstein, graduating in May and participating now in her seventh GCC production, plays one of these characters, an actress who “… has a lot of pride and just doesn’t believe this could be happening. For her, it’s completely absurd.”
Her cool assurances might seem more reasonable in contrast to some of the more heated responses, such as Cole Payne’s painter. “He has an understanding of what’s going on and he’s completely terrified,” says Payne, who described how he tries to infuse his body language with the “manic energy” of his character.
Similarly, Mike Terounzo describes his character, the electrician, as “a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t trust the government.” One of the most telling lines he delivers from his soapbox is, “You should try to think about why things happen.”
“It’s a timeless theme,” Terounzo says, “because people have to keep society in check. It’s hard to push back when you’re already so far downstream, and it’s important to not get so caught up in your own life that the world has changed without your even noticing.”
One thing that Nazi Germany taught the world was that sometimes events can change not only history, but also humanity itself. After the systematic rounding up and extermination of between 11 and 20 million Jews, Serbs, Poles, Russians, Roma, homosexuals and disabled people, is it possible to feel the same about humanity?
Prince von Berg, played with great sensitivity by local musician and actor Chris Devine, sums up that reality succinctly: “What one used to conceive a human being to be will have no room on this earth.”
Humanity might change from generation to generation, and yet there remains a visceral recognition of human experiences that are relevant and true. All the actors I spoke to marveled at the way this play speaks to our own time. “Surprisingly, audiences will relate more than they think,” says Fried-Harris.
The career of playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was at times political. His play about the Salem witch-trials of 17th century Massachusetts, “The Crucible” (1953), was written in response to his friend Elia Kazan’s experience testifying in front of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller himself was called to testify in 1957, found guilty of contempt for Congress, and was fined, blacklisted, denied a U.S. passport and sentenced to prison time. His charges were overturned in 1958.
Perhaps best known for “Death of a Salesman” (1949), widely considered one of the most important plays of the 20th century, Miller won many awards and prizes throughout his long and productive career, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Tony Award for Best Author and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
He also carried the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award in 1999, which is given each year to “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life,” according to the Foundation Directory Online.
The actors I spoke to all expressed appreciation for the artistry of Miller’s language and conceptualization, as well as the creative collaboration between them. “The experience has been nothing short of great,” said Bliss, while Wieliczka says simply, “Just being in it makes me happy.”
“Miller is one of my favorites,” agrees Masahiro Kamada. If you’ve seen Kamada in other productions, you might have a hard time recognizing him here. He’s aged a bit, and has switched ethnicities, playing the role of “old Jew.”
On-stage throughout the play, Kamada’s character has no speaking lines. “I am the weight of the play,” he says, “the anchor.” And truly, the old man sits there — watching, silent, grave — as the other characters flare and simmer around him.
“It’s amazing,” Director Geha observes, “he never breaks character for a second.”
It might seem strange that a playwright known for the precision and authenticity of his language would write in a character who never speaks. Then again, it could be Miller’s way of acknowledging that there are things in our world that are literally unspeakable.
Arthur Miller’s “Incident at Vichy” is playing at the Sloan Theater at Greenfield Community College.
Reservations at:
bit.ly/2nXsEn3
April 14, 15, 21, and 22 at 7:30 p.m.
April 15 at 2 p.m.
April 20 (ArtsNight) at 5 p.m.
Jenny Abeles is a writer and educator living in Greenfield. You can search her work online by including her middle name, Terpsichore.