Early Miller play pays off in revival

NEW YORK, May 31 (UPI) -- The Roundabout Theater Company has revived Arthur Miller's first full length produced play, "The Man Who Had All the Luck," with a lot more luck than the original producers.

The play ran only four performances when it premiered on Broadway in 1944, killed by bad reviews, and it has never been revived until the Roundabout mounted its richly realized new production at the American Airlines Theater starring Hollywood's Chris O'Donnell in his stage debut. O'Donnell's performance is outstanding enough to keep the play running for months to come.

Half the fun of seeing this play is seeing how good a playwright Miller was at this early stage in his career when he was 29 years of age. Although his breakthrough stage work, "Death of a Salesman," was still five years in the future, any Miller fan will be able to discern the roots of his success as a dramatist with a distinctive voice in "The Man Who Had All the Luck," a play with more than a few weaknesses but many more strengths.

Miller started to write the play in 1941 after meeting a widow from the Midwest who told him about her successful husband's inexplicable descent into depression and eventual suicide. He immediately interpreted this as the dark side of the American dream.

"It was through the evolving versions of this story that I began to find myself as a playwright, and perhaps even as a person," Miller wrote in his memoirs.

The plays chief flaw is the protagonist's vision of the world, a concept that flies in the face of ordinary experience. David Beeves, played by O'Donnell, sees that he is having all the luck in life while those about him are experiencing failure and guiltily concludes that he is in for a devastating reversal of fortune, such as the failure of his business or loss of his first child by miscarriage.

Beeves' paranoid ambivalence over events that most of us would accept gratefully as gifts from the gods seems unnatural but may reflect Miller's Jewish upbringing in a culture that regards too much luck with suspicion and feelings of culpability. Members of the audience that can accept the premise of the play at face value will be able to sit back and enjoy its many rewards.

The chief of these is O'Donnell's fully rounded characterization of a young man caught up in a moral dilemma not of his own making. The 31-year-old actor has made a name for himself in films as Robin in the "Batman" series and as co-star of "Scent of a Woman," "The Three Musketeers," "Circle of Friends," and "Cookie's Fortune," but his mastery of the complex role of Beeves firmly establishes him as a star.

Handsome, well set-up physically, and naïve, O'Donnell's Beeves has everything going for him. He is a young Midwestern car mechanic with natural talent for the work but little training, who is able to build a successful garage business with the aid of a local businessman and an Austrian immigrant who is a master mechanic but becomes Beeves' employee.

When Beeves wants to marry his girlfriend and is refused permission to do so by her father, the father promptly dies in an accident and the wedding is on. Then a satisfied customer at the garage turns out to be a mink-breeding tycoon and puts Beeves into another thriving business. The tycoon is promptly ruined by the death of his animals from feed poisoning, leaving Beeves with the only surviving breeding stock.

These events leave the young man remorseful but he is really conscious-stricken when his beloved brother fails to get a contract to pitch with a big league baseball team because their father has trained him improperly. Beeves' anguished father leaves home and returns to his old job as a cook on an ocean freighter, and his brother is literally crushed by resentment of his father's stupidity and his brother's success.

There are a half-dozen outstanding performances in "The Man Who Had All the Luck," none more compelling than David Wohl's in his brief appearance as a baseball scout of uncommon kindness and fairness. Jason Robards Jr. is impressive and totally sympathetic as the Austrian mechanic who tries to persuade Beeves that his luck reflects the value of his hard work and is something that should be welcomed and enjoyed.

Mason Adams makes a lovable old codger out of the mink breeder, James Rebhorn pulls out all the emotional stops in his characterization of the Beeves brothers' misguided father, and Ryan Shively imbues the brother with destructive tensions that become almost unbearable. Dan Moran is remarkable in the secondary role of a wheelchair-bound family friend who sees things as they are, and Samantha Mathis has the skill to make the underwritten role of Beeves' troubled wife memorably touching.

The barn-like repair shop and living room sets designed by Allen Moyer Allen and lighted by Kenneth Posner have the open grandeur and the homely details of wooden structures on the edge of the prairie, and the costumes provided by Michael Krass are suitably homespun.

Scott Ellis' direction of this production, first presented at the Williamstown, Mass., Theater Festival last summer, is one of the finest achievements of a distinguished career.