The Price

By Arthur Miller

April 19, 2024 – May 12, 2024

Directed by ICTC Associate Director Fortunato Pezzimenti

One of Arthur Miller’s rarely produced but powerful plays, The Price introduces us to Victor and his estranged brother, Walter, as they reunite after 30 years to sell their parents’ estate. Surrounded by the individual motives of Victor’s wife and an octogenarian antique dealer, tensions rise as Victor must face the sacrifice he made for his father. Award-Winning Actors Kate LoConti Alcocer, Todd Benzin, Tom Loughlin, and Ben Michael Moran star, directed by ICTC Associate Director Fortunato Pezzimenti.

Additional Programming:

Open Rehearsal (for Subscribers Only): Wednesday, April 10, 2024, at 6:30 pm

Pay-What-You-Will Performances*: Saturday, April 20, 2024, at 3:00 pm,
Saturday, April 20, 2024, at 7:30 pm,
Saturday, April 27, 2024, at 7:30 pm,
Saturday, May 4, 2024, at 7:30 pm,
Saturday, May 11, 2024, at 7:30 pm
(*Purchase in-person at the Box Office on the day of the performance. Seating subject to availability.)

Speaker Series: Sunday, April 28, 2024, at 1:30 pm (Featuring Dramaturg, E.L. Hohn)

Community Matinee: Wednesday, May 8, 2024, at 10:00 am

Open Captioned Performance: Thursday, May 9, 2024 at 7:30 pm
An LED captioning screen, located in the South East corner of the theatre displays the dialogue and any other audio portion of the production in text form in sync with the performance.

Director Note:

Arthur Miller began thinking about the play in the 1950’s, but it wasn’t until 1967 that The Price begin to crystallize in Miller’s imagination with a Broadway opening in 1968. It ran for 429 performances. 1968 was a tumultuous year of turmoil and change in the United States and the world with the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, the seven-day riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where protestors against the Vietnam War echoed the refrain “the whole world is watching.” Continuing, the Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong rattled the Pentagon, and “The Prague Spring” when the Soviet Union invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic to suppress a period of political liberalization. (A personal note, I visited Paris in 1968 where the student protests at the Sorbonne University were in full force. Also in the summer of 1968, I was in Vienna when protestors marched against the Soviet invasion of Prague, thus subverting my plans to travel there to enjoy the newly liberated intellectual and artistic pursuits of this exciting city.)

 A staunch critic of the Vietnam War, Miller indirectly addresses the war as well as civil rights in a candid look at the fractured American Dream. Themes of the consequences of choice and the relevance of the past to the present resonate strongly in The Price.

The Price, After the Fall, and Incident at Vichy, Miller’s three major plays of the 60’s, evoke the significant and crippling issues that can arise in the denial of the truth, betrayal, and responsibility in American attitudes toward race, in the waging of an immoral war, and the brutal inhumanity of the Holocaust.

Miller insists that there is a truth to be known, if we struggle to find it. More specifically, Miller states, “In each of my plays, the central creating force is Character. Through the experience of the common man, the public issues of a nation and finally of human existence are explored.”

The Price, All my Sons, and Death of a Salesman consider the relationship between Father and Son. As Miller writes, “Every person has an image of themselves which fails in one way or another to correspond to reality. The more a person understands themselves the less likely they are to trip on their own illusions. “L’homme doit se connaitre,” “Man must know himself.” The underlying struggle is to gain their place in society.”

In essence, The Price is a play about the impact of the past on the present. And the past that intrudes is the specter of The Crash of 1929 and the 1930’s.

Fortunato Pezzimenti, Director