BURBANK - It’s incredibly difficult to separate Arthur Miller the playwright from Arthur Miller the man in Broken Glass, one of the very last plays he ever wrote.  As performed by the uniformly excellent cast at the Victory Theatre Center, this morality play deals with the troubled marriage of a Jewish couple in Brooklyn.

The year is 1938 and the news from Germany has begun to chronicle the impending fate of the Jews of Europe.  In November of that year Kristallnacht covered the streets of Germany with the broken glass of countless store windows and synagogues.  And Sylvia Gellburg of Brooklyn, reading of those government-sanctioned pogroms, becomes so fearful that she brings on a hysterical paralysis of her own body. 

Sylvia, sensitively played by the exquisite Diedra Celeste, is confined to her wheelchair while her overwrought husband, Phillip (the impeccable Robert Picardo) searches their history to try to find the cause of this puzzling affliction. 

Phillip, a rigid and overbearing martinet in his own home, is a cringing sycophant at work.  Proud of the fact that he is “the only Jew ever hired by Brooklyn Guaranty”, he still struggles to fit in at the bank where he has spent his entire working life.

As a counterpoint to Phillip’s distraught and angry persona, Tom Ormeny plays Harry Hyman, the warm and sympathetic doctor who is trying to help the paralyzed Sylvia.  A handsome roué in his youth, Hyman is happily married to a bubbly Gentile woman (appealingly played by Janet Wood).  He seems to have no problem with his Jewishness; in fact, he is practically oblivious to it.  And yet he understands well the conflicted Phillip, who wavers between a suspended affection for the trappings and traditions of his religion and a predominant self-loathing of his own Jewishness.  This conflict is the underpinning of Broken Glass, and the philosophical discussions between the two men offer an insight into what you can’t help but suspect is a reflection of a struggle within the aging playwright himself. 

While all the players in this production are consistently convincing, special mention must be given to Randi Lynne Weidman who, in a relatively minor role as Sylvia’s sister, nearly walks away with the show.  She is the only one in this manifestly non-Jewish cast who adopts a Brooklyn accent and a Jewish intonation, and she is wonderful at it. 

Shira Dubrovner must be commended for her direction, as must Leonard Harman, who designed the sets: a functional office for Dr. Hyman and a warm, deep red bedroom for the supine heroine.  A nice touch during the dimly lit changes of scene was having a burly member of the crew carry the paralyzed Sylvia on and off the stage.  Another nice touch was the mournful cello and bass clarinet that provided background music between scenes. 

While this Miller play is no Death of a Salesman, it is also not one of his “lesser” plays.  It is a fascinating rumination on what it means to love, to age, and to be Jewish; one wonders why it has only been produced once before in L.A. since its creation in 1994.

But I must point out one major inaccuracy in the basic premise of Broken Glass.  While Sylvia agonizes and obsesses over the horrifying headlines and photographs of the Holocaust appearing on the front pages of the New York Times, that reportage, in fact, almost never happened.  The New York Times, to its endless shame, virtually ignored the Holocaust, burying its horrors in brief stories in the middle and back pages of the newspaper.  During the war years, according to the online Center for History and New Media, the Holocaust made the front page of the New York Times only 26 times among 24,000 front page stories, and most of those stories referred to the victims as “refugees” and “persecuted minorities”.  In only six of those stories were Jews identified on page one as the primary victims.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, Broken Glass is an interesting, thought-provoking, and creditable addition to Arthur Miller’s lifetime oeuvre.  And, as produced by the exceptionally fine ensemble at the Victory Theatre Center, well worth seeing.  You can see it weekends through December 3rd, so call 818-841-5421 for tickets. 

The Victory Theatre Center is located at 3326 W. Victory Blvd. in Burbank.