Broken Glass was published by Penguin in 1994 and premiered at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven before transferring to the Booth Theatre on Broadway in April 1994. The play won the Olivier Award for Best New Play in its London production.
Sylvia Gellburg, a Jewish woman in Brooklyn in November 1938, has become inexplicably paralyzed from the waist down. There is nothing physically wrong with her legs; the paralysis is psychosomatic. Her husband Phillip — a self-hating Jew who works for a gentile real estate company and has spent his life distancing himself from his Jewishness — cannot understand what has happened. Dr. Harry Hyman, their physician, suspects that Sylvia’s paralysis is connected to Kristallnacht: she has been obsessively reading newspaper accounts of the pogrom in Germany, and her body has responded to the distant violence by refusing to function.
Miller’s argument is that Sylvia’s paralysis is not pathological but prophetic: she is the one member of her community who has fully absorbed the meaning of what is happening in Europe, and her body has expressed what her conscious mind cannot articulate — the terror of being Jewish in a world that is preparing to exterminate Jews. Phillip’s self-hatred and denial (he insists they are Americans, not really Jews, that what happens in Europe has nothing to do with them) is the more common response, and the play treats it as the true pathology.
The broken glass of the title refers both to Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”) and to the shattered surface of the Gellburgs’ marriage, beneath which lies a sexual dysfunction that mirrors the larger paralysis: Phillip cannot perform sexually with Sylvia, and his impotence — like her paralysis — is a psychosomatic expression of a crisis he refuses to name.
Collecting Broken Glass
First edition (Penguin, New York, 1994): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $10–$25
- Signed: $50–$100