The Price was published by Viking Press in 1968 and premiered at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway on February 7, 1968. The play has four characters: Victor Franz, a policeman nearing retirement; his wife Esther; his older brother Walter, a successful surgeon; and Gregory Solomon, an eighty-nine-year-old used furniture dealer.
Victor and Esther have come to the attic of their family’s old brownstone to sell the furniture left by their dead father. Victor sacrificed his education and his ambitions to support his father during the Depression — he dropped out of college, became a policeman, and spent decades in a career he never wanted because someone had to take care of the old man. Walter, meanwhile, went to medical school, became wealthy, and did not help. The brothers have not spoken in years.
When Walter arrives, the sale of the furniture becomes the occasion for a reckoning that is really about the price each brother paid for the choice he made — and whether those choices were as inevitable as they tell themselves. Victor’s sacrifice was genuine, but it was also a choice: he could have insisted that Walter share the burden, could have pursued his own ambitions, could have let the old man fend for himself. Walter’s selfishness was real, but it was also the product of a clear-eyed assessment of their father’s character: the old man, Walter reveals, had money he never disclosed, and Victor’s sacrifice was based on a false premise.
Gregory Solomon — the ancient, wily furniture dealer who refuses to retire because work is the only thing keeping him alive — is one of Miller’s greatest creations: a comic character in a serious play, a man whose professionalism and life force provide a counterweight to the brothers’ bitter accounting. Solomon’s vitality — his jokes, his appetite, his refusal of self-pity — embodies the alternative to the Franz brothers’ paralysis.
Collecting The Price
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1968): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75