'After the Fall' by Eclipse Theatre: Journey inside Arthur Miller's head stops short of the fall
THEATER REVIEW: "After the Fall" ★★½ Through Aug. 22 at the Greenhouse Theatre Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes; Tickets: $25 at 773-404-7336 or www.eclipsetheatre.com
Somewhere in the third hour of the Eclipse Theatre production of “After the Fall,” somewhere amidst the cries of “Love me!” and “Give me the pills!,” director Steve Scott's production starts to wilt like a punching bag that has undergone one too many painful blows.
That relentless last hour, that unexpurgated portrait of Maggie (an alter ego for Marilyn Monroe) needing, demanding, loving, and Quentin (a stand-in for the author) inexorably realizing that he was ill-equipped to give her the tools to prevent her self-destruction, is why this 1964 Arthur Miller play, this most nakedly personal of Miller's plays, is so fiendishly difficulty to produce.
And the disappointment you feel as this fluid, tempestuous show unravels is actually testimony to richness of the first two hours — of a very craftful production that somehow manages to cram 15 actors and a lifetime of authorial contemplation and regret into a tiny studio theater on Lincoln Avenue.
You find yourself sitting bolt upright, thinking about how difficult it really was for the intellectual denizens of the fractured middle of the 20th century to actually be happy.
Oh the crises, the cataclysms, the distractions! Sex. Communism. McCarthyism. No wonder Quentin is reduced to statements like “I don't sleep with other woman, but I think I behave as though I do.” He couldn't keep his head straight.