M&M Performing Arts Company is a regional theater group that was founded in 2000 and has produced more than a hundred productions at seventy-five venues throughout the Hudson River Valley. Today, it is the resident company at Lyndhurst, one of the grand Gothic Revival mansions built along the shores of the Hudson in the 1800s and made famous as the country estates of New York’s Gilded Age robber barons. Originally built in 1838 and extensively expanded in the 1860s, Lyndhurst was purchased by the railroad magnate and stock speculator Jay Gould in 1880. Today, it is overseen by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is open to the public, and is the scene of many cultural events. An architectural classic, it is among the locales for the HBO television series The Gilded Age, and the Westminster Kennel Club relocated its famous annual Dog Show from Madison Square Garden in Manhattan to the sixty-seven-acre grounds of Lyndhurst in 2021 and 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.The building’s opulent décor and winding staircases created a perfect setting for M&M’s production of The Price. Entering on the ground floor and walking past several rooms before ascending the stairs to a long, narrow gallery cluttered with nineteenth-century landscapes and portraiture, audience members were aptly prepared for a play where the power of the past is represented by overwhelming furnishings that no longer fit with the present but nonetheless dominate the moment. The intimacy of the gallery also served the production. Thirty-five chairs were arranged in two rows along one long wall; the performance took place before the paintings and other ornate objets d’art on the opposite wall. Added to these were a crank-powered Victrola; an elegant foil, provided by the nearby Peekskill Fencing Center; and an exquisite harp, contributed by Janette Devine, a local Celtic harpist—each prop an emblem of significant elements in the Franz family’s past. The house lights were left on during the performance, and the actors were only a few feet from the audience, adding to the sense of sharing a confined space with the Franz brothers rather than observing them from afar. Miller’s text was cut so that the play could be performed as an eighty-minute one-act. Some significant themes were omitted, such as Solomon’s references to his daughter’s suicide and the discussion of the brothers’ building radios in the attic in their youth, but the editing was adept, and the flow of the play’s major quandaries and confrontations remained well preserved.From its opening moments, this production was distinguished from others I have seen by its depiction of Victor and his wife, Esther. The production’s co-directors, Melinda O’Brien and Michael Muldoon, took these roles themselves and gave us a portrait of two people who met in their youth and for decades have had a loving and supportive marriage. O’Brien’s Esther revealed none of the frustration and disappointment in her life that often is seen in other productions. This Esther appreciates Victor and is happy with the life they have built together. She does wish Victor would decide about retiring from the police force, just so she could have a better sense of the direction their life is taking, but she seems motivated here by a genuine concern for Victor’s happiness, not by resentment that a flaw in Victor is destroying her own life. Certainly, she understands that the sale of the furniture offers an opportunity to have a bit of extra money that could open new options in their life, but she is not desperate for this money; she is not grasping toward it as a hoped-for respite from a marriage that has been little more than years of frustrated disappointment. She has no significant disappointment in her life.Often lines stick with you during a performance as telling revelations of the way an actor has conceived of his or her character. For me, O’Brien’s Esther was revealed most vividly in her response to Walter in the midst of the brothers’ most intense argument. Walter is castigating Victor for living in a comforting delusion about their father’s neediness and an unjustified self-righteous anger, saying that Victor’s sacrifice of his life to nothing more than vengeance is the real source of his humiliating situation, not some heightened moral nobility. O’Brien’s Esther steps up behind Victor and calmly replies to Walter without the slightest sense of doubt, “Nothing was sacrificed” (112). This Esther of course realizes that her and Victor’s life has been different from Walter’s, but it is no less worthy of respect and probably more fulfilling. Walter’s claim that their lives express nothing but failure isn’t even worth an angry response. O’Brien’s Esther was not defensive here; she calmly dismissed his claim as simply silly. Toward the play’s end, she and Victor kiss before they exit together. This is not a newfound affection that has arisen from the recent confrontation in the attic. We have the sense that their joy in each other has been central to both their lives from the beginning of their marriage.Michael Muldoon’s Victor fit well with the stable personal dignity that O’Brien brought to Esther. Almost immediately after he enters and begins his banter with Esther before Solomon arrives, we experience this Victor as essentially contented and straightforward—just a really nice guy. Their conversation was teasingly loving. We had no sense they were struggling to control long-held resentments and anger just below the surface that had been building over years of feeling trapped together in an unfulfilling marriage. Like anyone facing a moment of significant change in his life, this Victor reflects on his past and considers how realistic various options are for his future as he thinks about retiring from the police force, but he is not in existential crisis. There were disappointments in his relationship with his father and his brother in the past, but he now has moved beyond those to a life that is made worthy by the joy he takes in Esther and their son, even if his work as a policeman has been merely an unfulfilling means to little more than an income.Victor’s anger at Walter as their conversation progresses arises more from disbelief than a shamed response to humiliation: How can Walter go through life without realizing how phony he is and how little regard he has for other people? When Victor summarizes Walter’s life by saying, “You’ve got no wife, you lost your family, you’re rattling around all over the place” (98), he means it; Muldoon delivered the line calmly, not defensively. Esther and their son are the values on which this Victor has based his life; they are the joy that has enabled him to move on from his past into dignity and contentment. From this Victor’s perspective, Walter may have worldly status, but his life is essentially empty. Walter is in no position to demean anyone else’s life as a failure, and this Victor is certain he himself has not failed. He has much for which to be proud and thankful.When Walter enters and asks what Victor and Esther’s son is doing, Victor replies that he is in an honors program at MIT on a full scholarship. Walter is surprised and, being competitive, somewhat embarrassed by the accomplishment. He replies that Victor must be proud, and clearly Muldoon’s Victor is, but he responds not with a gloating delight in being able to score competitive points with his brother but with an expression of joyful recollection of the fun he and Esther had in bringing up this boy who now is launching into life with such promise. Despite regrets, which we all have in some fashion, Muldoon’s Victor is secure in the life he has built and grateful for the joys it has offered; he takes pride in his ability to maintain them.Richard Troiano provided an able portrait of the kind of Walter that Muldoon’s Victor perceived his brother to be. From his first appearance, this Walter struck me as a salesman. Competitive and insecure in his sense of self, he had an arrogance that disguised a desperate need for other people’s acceptance of the story he was selling about his own significance so that he could believe it himself. When he offers Victor a job at the new hospital, this Walter may be telling himself that the offer is realistic and sincere, but it is indeed as outrageous as Victor perceives it to be. The job could be no more than an empty appearance that Victor would lack the skills to fill authentically. But Walter cannot see this; he lives in a world of appearances, which is part of what prompts him to suggest the tax-deduction scheme as a way of getting more money for the furniture: “It’s a dream world, but it’s legal” (72). The tragedy of his life has arisen from those appearances needing constant attention and reinforcement from other people to the point that nothing for him ever has felt sustainably real.Walter’s entire life is a frightened performance of a self-image he finds chronically elusive. When other people’s responses to his performance raise questions, he lacks the inner resources to do anything other than lash out at them, which seems literally to have been the case when he drunkenly attacked his wife with a knife. His self-centered use of other people merely as mirrors for his own self-image left him little means to connect with his children, and they have drifted away. As Troiano rendered Walter’s account of his life after his nervous breakdown, I had the sense of a man speaking to himself rather than honestly relating his experience to Victor and Esther. This Walter was not sure what to think of his life, but he was searching for a redeeming story. He was again trying out an image to see if Victor and Esther would buy it; if they did, then perhaps he could believe it, too—but without their reflecting the image he was presenting, he had no way to experience his story as real. This Walter could exist for himself only as other people saw him; he was incapable of constructing an identity that he could maintain securely by himself. It is little wonder that Walter describes both his own life and his brother’s as being driven by terror: “It was terror. In dead center, directing my brain, my hands, my ambition—for thirty years. . . . Of it ever happening to me as it had happened to him [a reference to their father’s failed business]. Overnight, for no reason, to find yourself degraded and thrown-down. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? . . . Vic, we were both running from the same thing” (84).In other productions I have seen, the play is Victor’s tragedy. Victor is the character who is forced to recognize the role his own cowardice has had in shaping the path of a life he finds humiliating and unfulfilling; he no longer can excuse himself by telling a victim story. In this production, however, Victor was secure in his sense of self. The tragic character was Walter, a man who has no internally stable sense of his own worth and what he values, who constantly is onstage in his life, selling his story to other people in the desperate hope that they will buy it so that he, at least momentarily, can cling to it himself.When this Walter exits, saying to Victor and Esther, “You will never, never again make me ashamed” (113), we wonder what Walter means by “shame.” For this Walter, shame seems to be only something other people impose upon you. He needs constantly to be on guard against these external assaults and to be prepared with an arsenal of defenses, primarily an impressive résumé—a list of performances—since a secure inner sense of worth and stability is beyond this Walter’s reach. He seems incapable of experiencing shame as the result of self-reflection and evaluation of actions he must own as parts of who he is. Walter has no self of this kind; his self is merely an appearance that is constantly under threat from his audiences. That lack of a self beyond appearance to others was Walter’s tragedy in this production. His fragility was highlighted by the genuinely fulfilling marriage Victor and Esther shared and by the courage of the furniture dealer Gregory Solomon to “bounce” (45) from several past defeats to new ways of engaging with the world that he found honest and fulfilling, regardless of how others may have perceived him.In shortening the script for a one-act performance, many of Gregory Solomon’s lines were cut so he no longer seemed to function as a kind of Greek chorus reflecting on the actions of all the other characters. He now was merely one character among the others, who, like them, needed to decide about what to do next with his life. The focus was on his decision whether to take on such a large load of furniture given his advanced age, having essentially shut down his business several years earlier. Interestingly, to accommodate actor Bruce Apar’s more youthful appearance, a change in the script cut ten years from Solomon’s age, making him seventy-nine instead of eighty-nine, but Apar nonetheless gave a convincing performance as a man beginning to take seriously the ways advancing age and a heightened sense of mortality narrow a person’s feelings about what is reasonable to pursue.Prior to seeing Apar’s performance, I had not understood why Miller made so much of Solomon’s experience as president of the Appraisers’ Association who “made it all ethical,” a point Miller repeats twice (61, 87). But now, seeing this Solomon in contrast to Troiano’s Walter, a prisoner of shallow appearances, I think I do. After several careers, at least one of which was as a vaudeville acrobat, Solomon in midlife became a used furniture dealer, a business that, by his own admission, comes down to little more than personal attitudes about value, “a viewpoint” (43). It is a business broadly open to spin and hustle, to salesmanship that manipulates appearances to mold other people’s attitudes. But Solomon made it “ethical,” which in this case means he tried to ground it in something real and objective behind the mere flimflam of appearance. Certainly, tastes and markets change. Like any product, used furniture is valuable only to someone who wants it. But if lots of people want a particular kind of furniture at a certain time, its value goes up; if not, it goes down. There are objective facts about changing tastes and markets to be understood. It is not merely a matter of bluffing your way along by convincing people through manipulating nothing more than appearances.Given Solomon’s pride in having made the appraiser’s profession “ethical,” when he says he loved the work (40), he is saying he loved the practical challenges of understanding these objective markets well enough to sustain a viable business. He was not simply selling an image; his appraisals were grounded in an understanding of the realities of current market situations. Even if other people may think that Solomon and all used furniture dealers are mere hustlers—as all the other characters in the play initially do—Solomon himself understands that what he does is real. He need not pay attention to their misguided evaluation of his appearance. His sense of who he is is not based on their opinions. This makes him different from Walter, for whom other people’s acceptance of the appearance he is selling them is his only sense of reality. Without others’ acceptance of his projected appearance, he has no idea who he is.In this production, that distinction between selves grounded in appearance to others and selves grounded in an inner sense of value and reality was made the focus of the play. Walter was the tragic figure, a man whose fragile sense of self left him in chronic need of other people’s acceptance of the story he desperately tried to sell them through self-display. Inwardly insecure, he was a psychological bully who felt safe only in situations he was certain he could dominate. This was contrasted with Solomon, who had a sense of personal reality, grounded in the practical expertise he brought to his work, regardless of other people’s misguided suspicions. It was that inward sense of personal reality that brought him such joy in his work. Walter also was contrasted with Victor and Esther, who had escaped past disappointments to find happiness in a shared life where they sustained each other through challenges and took joy in small triumphs. They had a solid sense of who they were, appreciated each other, and valued what they had built together. Solomon, Victor, and Esther were authentic in a way that Walter, despite his worldly stature, could not understand and therefore was incapable of pursuing. He was doomed to the terror of always fearing how he appeared to others. That was his tragedy. Like Willy Loman’s, his life was the ever-encroaching death of a salesman.Since 2017, I have reviewed six productions of The Price. Each has been different; each presented distinct interpretations of the characters and of the play’s central theme. The M&M production provides yet again a new understanding of Miller’s text and is a worthy addition to this list. Once again, I gained significant insights into the play and what it can mean for my own life by watching an excellent production. Like all writers, dramatists create texts, and texts are interpreted by readers. But in drama, performance can be inserted between the author and the audience, often revealing new insights that even careful readers, or indeed even the authors themselves, may not have anticipated. It always is worth going to the theater, even—or perhaps especially—to see plays we think we know well.