Broken Glass Review – Arthur Miller’s shattering drama chills with new political resonance | stage

SSome might say that Arthur Miller’s 1994 play is performed less often for good reason. “Broken Glass” is about the unhappy marriage of an American-Jewish couple in Brooklyn and also about America’s inaction in the face of growing Nazi terrorism. You see the play trying to tie these two parts together – and yet this production becomes terrifyingly hypnotic and resonant.

It’s 1938, and Sylvia Gilborg (Pearl Chanda) is a housewife whose legs suddenly and mysteriously stop working after she reads about Kristallnacht in the newspapers. She is considered hysterical by her husband, Philip (Eli Gelb)—a typical Miller man, outwardly capable but nursing secret wounds and impotence—and the doctor (Alex Waldman) describes her condition as psychosomatic.

Miller appears to be playing Dr. Freud (or Dr. Charcot) in his psychological exploration of Sylvia’s paralysis, but he is intent on giving it greater political symbolism as well. The domestic tyranny in Sylvia’s marriage is likened to greater oppression.

The entanglement of the personal, political, social and sexual feels patchy, but there is so much emotional power in Jordan Finn’s production, such exceptional performances by Gelb and Shanda, and so many shocking parallels with current political indifference to atrocities around the world, that the play’s lack of internal cohesion becomes irrelevant.

Finn leans into the chaos of the play through the use of a glowing kind of non-naturalism, from the glass screen behind which some characters stare at the onstage drama, to a central bed strewn with newspapers from 1938 to the present. This part of the set, designed by Rosanna Fies to suggest a bedroom, antechamber and parliamentary room, is reminiscent of a Cornelia Parker painting left, right and centre.

Sylvia’s paralysis is a metaphor for a world numbed by the horror of fascism and her protest against it. The Jewish Brooklynites around her ask each other what Nazi persecution has to do with them—including the self-loathing Philip, whom Gelb raises, giving him a far greater depth of pain. His looking away, for Sylvia (and Miller, it seems), is tantamount to complicity. Finn seems to suggest that these characters’ insensitivity to horrific news reports is our own by juxtaposing headlines about Nazi terrorism with current headlines like “Gaza or Gaga?”, about Donald Trump’s vision to rebuild the devastated region and turn it into a tourist haven.

Tom Gibbons creates brilliantly simple sound design with dramatic effects, although the show has a severe case of excessive symbolism (such as the four clocks on the wall, airport style, suggesting that the tyranny on the other side of the world is America’s tyranny). There are scenes that are shocking and interesting, involving the characters and the audience, even if the drastic decision to leave the lights dimmed is unnecessary.

In a 1994 interview, Miller spoke of the resurgence of terrorism in his world, including the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and said he would not have believed that humanity would “slip into such tribalism again.” If only he could see us now.