NEW YORK, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Arthur Miller's "After the Fall" is the playwright's portrait of a self-lacerating attorney searching for the meaning of life and requires an actor able to depict soul-shattering emotions in the autobiographic role of Quentin.
Jason Robards suffered with flair in this intimidating role in the play's first Broadway production in 1964, and Frank Langella wrestled affectingly with Quentin's conscience in a 1984 revival. But for the current second revival of the work by the Roundabout Theater Company at the American Airlines Theater, Peter Krause, who lacks the necessary neurotic vitality and is obviously miscast in his Broadway debut, is taking on the role of Quentin with considerably less success.
Krause is the handsome actor who has acquired an adoring TV audience playing the role of the moodily attractive, self-dramatizing undertaker Nate Fisher on HBO's macabre series "Six Feet Under," but he is unable to create an equally three-dimensional character onstage as Quentin. For this role he is simply not brooding enough nor steeped thoroughly enough in the tragedy of his own misspent life.
"After the Fall," considered the most cerebral of Miller's plays, has been criticized as a self-serving exercise on the part of the playwright to explicate the failure of his odd-couple marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe by portraying her as a tawdry sexual predator with a mean streak and a suicidal bent fed by narcotics and alcohol. Carla Gugino, who played federal marshal Karen Sisco in the ABC television series of the same name, brilliantly plays the Marilyn role of Maggie.
It is also Gugino's Broadway debut, and her fascinatingly accurate Marilyn portrait (with red hair, not blond) should go far in opening up a stage career for her. If there is a reason to see this off-kilter revival of "After the Fall," it is to see Gugino take a juicy role and run with it, just as she did as the star of the TV dramatization of Edith Wharton's novel "The Buccaneers."
Miller has lightly disguised himself as Quentin, a character haunted by the failure to connect with his difficult first wife -- on whom he cheated with a warm, lovable German archaeologist who survived the Holocaust and introduces Quentin to its ghosts -- and by Sen. Joseph McCarthy's hearings into American communist subversion at which Quentin appears as a defense attorney.
There is also Quentin's tortured relationship with his possessive, highly sexed mother and his dying Jewish patriarch father with whom he is out of touch. He has enough guilt and outrage concerning his inadequate relationships to send him into an occasional rant about how wretched man really is, but in Krause's mouth Quentin's diatribes sound weak and empty of any real emotion.
Krause manages to make an unsympathetic lead character even less empathetic than the playwright intended. Only at the very end does his character lighten as he reaches out to a vision of his fair-haired muse, the archaeologist Holga, who is undoubtedly a thinly veiled portrait of Miller's third wife, photographer Inge Morath, with whom he had a happy marriage.
Michael Mayer's direction is not up to the standard he set for directing a Miller play with the Roundabout Theater's recent revival of "A View From the Bridge." The setting, a sleek, all-gray airline terminal that recalls the ultra-modern TWA terminal at Kennedy International Airport as it was in 1962, presents Mayer with difficulties in establishing a sense of place for the play's many scenes and facilitates a considerable level of confusion.
Candy Buckley is delicious as Quentin's flapper mother, and Vivienne Benesch is perfectly poised as the nurturing Holga. Jessica Hecht is appropriately unpleasant as the nagging first wife, Louise, but she withholds any clue as to why Quentin was attracted to her in the first place. Dan Ziskie gives a fine performance as the father, and Jonathan Walker and Mark Nelson give a decent accounting of McCarthy victims.
Richard Hoover's set has a womb-like quality that serves the play well symbolically with the help of Donald Holder's lighting. Michael Krass's costumes add much to the flavor of a play covering several decades, and his seductive gowns for Maggie might have been lifted from Monroe's own memorable wardrobe. Elaine J. McCarthy is credited with the shadowy photo projection that briefly suggests a Nazi concentration camp.
Meanwhile, the 88-year-old Miller is having a new play, "Finishing the Picture," staged by the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago this fall. It has a Marilyn Monroe-like protagonist who is making a movie not unlike "The Misfits," the 1961 film Miller wrote especially for Monroe. It was to be her last film. She died in 1962, less than two years before "After the Fall" had its premiere.
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