And It Feels Just Like I'm Walking on...

The world's there and it's free to use, pun police notwithstanding: the current performance of Arthur Miller's Broken Glass at the Kirkland Junior Common Room can only be described as fragmented--but intriguingly so. The actors have realized their characters into living and breathing beings with mannerisms and mental meanderings only to be foiled by a pervasive lack of synchronicity that leaves every interaction a half-beat off. The result is something less than a couple of human tragedies and something more like an emotional detective story.

Part of Miller's recent work, Broken Glass treats the long-but feebly-standing marriage bewteen a Jewish couple in 1938 Brooklyn. The wife, Sylvia (Tegan Shohet '01), has psychosomatic paralysis of the legs after seeing daily newspaper photographs of Nazi humiliation of Jews. Husband Phillip (Jesse Kellerman '01) is an anxious, fundamentally confused individual submerged in a WASP business; he approaches any given situation with bullish anxiety.

The undeniable influence and connection with events far afield and how they affect the basic relationship between husband and wife lies at the heart of the work. Atrocity on a national scale is mirrored by emotional aggression on a domestic scale, as Phillip'sa frustration, hostile for all its blindness, seethes at something that can't be explained or denied. Suspicions and confusion arise as if muddled foreign policy with the involvement of an equestrian doctor (Zachary Shrier '99) whose "unconventional" methods include all too casual relations with the patent.

So considering all the tethering going on--husband to wife and self-denial, doctor to patient and duty, etc.--the difficulties of putting into performance such interlacing and interlocking balances and relationships are understandable. Considering the importance of some such connections existing before fragmentation occurs, however, the Kirkland performances become tantalizing in their inevtiably new spin on Miller's Scenario.

Take the doctor. Horse-loving Harry Hyman's always been a hearthrob to the gals but has since settled down with an appropriately braying wife (Rebekah Shoaf '00). Somewhere in him, passion lurks, to even a cautious reading of the play, to the extent that we recognize it lurking even in his cavalier attitude towards cigars. He's a doctor, but some-where his medical training (occurring, to great and ironic controversy, in Germany, because of American quotas) allowed a human weakness to slip by.

Shrier takes the doctor by the Hippocratic horns--we never, ever lose the conception that the individual on stage has offered a waiting room-full of somber patients dire diagnoses that can only be delivered behind closed doors and thick desk. His tone borders on that of the tirelessly tireless banner-holders of American Progress: those great 50s sci-fi scientists intoning the mysteries of the future today. It's an admirable feat of dedicated characterization, and Shrier is here nothing if not consistent.

But at some point we're going to have to believe that Hyman succumbs to and recriprocates the endless radar pleas emanating from afflicted Sylvia at the presence of Hyman. At one point, keying into Sylvia's wide-band frequency, Hyman solemnly advises Sylvia to fantasize that she has just made love to him, as a way to break the spell that the paralysis has come to appear to be. The scene is eminently conceivable, given the psychological pathfinding that has gone on in determinig Sylvia's ailment.

And in the hands of Shrier, the delivery seems outlandish in its seriousness, as if a strange corruption in the play's text--devoid of any ambiguous undertones that would point up the doctor's assumed staidness, perhaps self-consciously realized as false, perhaps not. Instead, it becomes another prescription, and the questioning yet fascinated look from Sylvia seems almost camp, as the moment of connection slips away.

On paper, the two have reached one another; in performance, the two have not--all the more frustratingly so, because both have imbued the characters with such a demonstrable roundness, through careful choices of facial gestures and mannerisms.

Similarly, Kellerman's Phillip might well be someone you'd figure on bumping into if you zipped back a few years a la Time and Again. Kellerman's marvelously expressive face and heavy carriage capture perfectly the psychological and economic burden: you get the sense he's wearing a lead coat. He's perhaps matched only by the personality of Shohet's face, but he works his to greater advantage.

The detective bit comes in, therefore, as we are faced with stringing together the characters, who seem to exist in independent bubbles--very well-acted bubbles, but bubbles nonetheless. Phillip throws Sylvia to the ground, but he starts just--just--a little to early, and the moment is off. Some pauses adopt an almost film noirish mystery, instead of magnifying emotion.

To the credit of the actors, though, they manage to create worlds within themselves, leading to an almost incongruous comic machine in the form of Ilana Kurshan's Harriet, sister to Sylvia. Her mole like searching head and wide eyes cast light on the otherwise dour proceedings, while providing a kind of insider's guide to the marriage. At the same time, though, even Kurshan acquires a police-witness-feel in her casual chat with a gumshoe Hyman. Young Lee '99, as Phillip's boss whose pet project is adding a spiffy annex to the New York Harvard Club, reaches similar comic heights with dead-on self-importance but, too, flounders when trying to tap into the play's underlying texture.

One well-realized element of Miller's script is a "lone cellist," here ingeniously expanded to two, probably as underapreciated as it is slightly overused. Like voices calling and responding to one another, they act, unlike much musical interscenic filler, to further contemplation with subtle gradations of emotion rather than the current fad of ironic comment or scene-labeling through dastardly clever epoch-hopping musical selection. Bach (played by Laura Lee'00) and Gounod (Luba Mandzy '01) trade strains here, at the same time softening and commenting upon the rough edges of Miller's emotional landscape.

The character-centered production, of course, is probably an appropriate result of an implicit concentration on identity (here, ultimately that of a Jewish community in November 1938 that exists concurrently with Jewish communities suffering horribly in Nazi Germany). The allusive title binds the two in its surface mundane apperance and its actual reference. Yet this connecting of the dots in the greater picture just doesn't happen enough, and the audience--faced with the struggle of a number of fine performances but a frustrating lack of compelling, well-paced interaction--must pick up the pieces.