Play: The Price

Overview
Arthur Miller’s 1968 play The Price is a compact four-character drama set in a single room and powered by a lifetime of choices. A New York policeman on the verge of retirement reconnects with his estranged brother, a successful surgeon, to sell the furniture left from their father’s once-prosperous household. As an elderly dealer appraises the lot and a wife presses for a future beyond scarcity, the past is revalued in real time. The title signals both the literal price of objects and the moral, emotional, and existential costs of decisions made during the Great Depression and carried for decades.

Setting and Premise
The action unfolds in the cluttered attic of a Manhattan brownstone slated for demolition. The space is choked with heavy Victorian furniture, a harp, tables, mirrors, massive chairs, survivors of a fortune lost in the crash. Victor Franz, the cop who stayed home to support their father, has invited Gregory Solomon, an octogenarian dealer, to make an offer. Victor’s wife, Esther, hopes the sale will finance a long-delayed change. Into this practical errand walks Walter Franz, the brother who left, thrived, and avoided the past. The room becomes an arena where objects trigger competing memories and buried grievances.

Plot Summary
Solomon arrives with stories, savvy, and a haggler’s patience, chipping away at Victor’s expectations while sizing up not just the furniture but the sellers’ desperation. Esther presses Victor to hold firm or walk away; she wants a life that isn’t defined by sacrifice. Walter’s late entrance destabilizes the transaction. Courteous at first, he soon probes old wounds, questioning why Victor abandoned college and a promising career to become a cop. Victor insists there was no choice: their father was ruined and dependent. Walter counters that their father had resources and pride, that Victor clung to duty even when other paths reopened.

The negotiation over cedar chests and rosewood tables becomes a negotiation over memory. Each brother accuses the other of self-deception, Victor sees Walter as abandoning family for status; Walter sees Victor as choosing martyrdom and blaming circumstance. Walter reveals a personal collapse behind his success, a breakdown that exposed the hollowness of his achievements. He offers various forms of redress, money, a new partnership, a fresh understanding, trying to recalibrate the ledger. Victor, suspicious and tired, hears only revisionism that makes his life into an avoidable mistake.

Solomon, part clown and part sage, keeps tugging the talk back to dollars and condition while dropping philosophical asides about what things are worth on the day you sell them. Esther alternates between peacemaking and impatience, aware that time and opportunity are slipping. The deal inches forward, stalls, and inches again as the brothers’ confrontation crests: a fierce argument about who protected their father, who used him, and who needed him to need them.

Themes and Resonance
The play measures the distance between market value and human value. Furniture becomes a repository of memory and a mirror of self-justifications. Miller stages truth as a clash of plausible stories, where the price of survival includes compromised identity, marital strain, and sibling estrangement. Duty, ambition, and the American promise of reinvention are weighed against the stubborn weight of the past. Time functions as a fifth character, compressing decades into a single afternoon and forcing a reckoning.

Ending
The sale is settled, but no agreement can balance the emotional books. Walter departs without a clear reconciliation, Esther faces the cost of Victor’s choices, and Solomon’s steadying presence returns the room to cash and paperwork. What remains is the sense that, alongside any check written for the furniture, another, unpayable account continues to accrue, proof that the fiercest haggling in The Price is over what a life has been worth.