Broken Glass
Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass is a really weird play. A lot weirder than official summaries tend to divulge. Which is impressive given that official summaries will tell you that it concerns a Jewish Brooklyn housewife who is inexplicably paralysed in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Germany’s 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom.
But that doesn’t touch the fact that Miller’s last big hit is a seething Freudian stew, spiced with Jewish guilt, a heady, occasionally surreal blend of desire and regret. Its protagonists are the paralysed Sylvia (Pearl Chanda) and her husband Philip (Eli Gelb), and while they’re middle aged - and director Jordan Fein seems to have intentionally cast actors too young for the roles as written - it’s hard not to view it through the lens of Miller having been in his late seventies and looking back with his own regrets when Broken Glass premiered in 1994.
The man had lived an extraordinary lifetime, and written extraordinary dramas. But he’d rarely explicitly written about either sex or Jewishness. Here he does both in a strange period piece that doesn’t conform to the thunderous classical tragedy of his most famous works. But certainly there is much about it that proves tragic, not least in Philip, whose fear of his own passions and heritage have led to a superficially successful but ultimately unfulfilled life.
The couple’s regrets are substantially tied to sex, although they struggle to articulate that until it’s slowly prised out of them by Harry Hyman (Alex...