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STEPHEN KUNKEN ©2025  

TACT, the company putting on the mostly sturdy revival of Arthur Miller’s intense WWII-era drama Incident at Vichy, is to be commended for staying true to their acronym. Often dealing in revivals, they have a workmanlike approach that never mars the texts of the originals, or places theatrical bravado in place of old-fashioned storytelling. However, in the case of Miller, whose plays have an almost saturnine tension level, it also doesn’t hurt to ratchet up things a tad, and while director Scott Alan Evans’ current production on Theatre Row is thoroughly engaging, it never quite seeps into the soul as one would hope. The material may be set in 1942, but its themes of random, selected worth and moral paranoia have never been more prescient.

STEPHEN KUNKEN ©2025  

For those unfamiliar with the play, it is set in a detention room in Vichy, France, where through a nicely chilling opening effect, the audience sees the number of men detained increase through a series of lighting bursts. Slowly, we see a large number of detainees, including a beret-outfitted, literally starving painter (Mark Alhadeff), a psychiatrist (Christopher Burns) who grapples with the mystery most painstakingly, a Prince (Todd Gearhart) who most feel will escape imprisonment due to his elevated status and Austrian background, and scattered others including an actor, a waiter, a gypsy, a 14 year-old boy and in Miller’s least subtle of his theatrical characters, an Old Jew. They sit, line-up style, on a long bench while guards come in and out of a holding center, including the Major (Jack Koenig), who possesses a limp and does not seem to agree with where the questioning will be heading, and defiantly distances himself from the title of SS.

Miller was criticized when the play premiered for using a horrific event like the Holocaust to craft a morality play, but years later, one can see that it’s the inner struggle of these men Miller was most interested in. For the 1960s, it was quite daring to present men as willing participants in their eventual death, as resistance as represented in this play is mostly just discussed rather than played out. And the frank discussion of the guards searching the men’s genitals for evidence of circumcision was awfully daring to consider (and when one man bellows the word “cocks” for effect, it is as jarringly direct now as it must have been in 1964). Sure, these men represent mouthpieces, but when it’s Miller’s muscular language coming out of their mouths, one can’t help but be gripped.

So it’s with some disappointment that this production doesn’t create a bold enough ambiance for those words. Even in the intimate Beckett Theatre, you don’t get that claustrophobic feeling the production could have benefited from; furthermore, it doesn’t quite resemble what Miller has one character vividly describes as the look of “dead clams…with a little yellow mixed in.” And the cast is uneven (with a few sporting unfortunate mustaches that their faces clearly do not suit), with some strong presences (Burns, Alhadeff) and some struggling with their characterizations (Gearhart’s Austrian prince sounds more Brooklynese than Austrian, and his body language is indistinct, particularly for the period).

Still, it is a worthwhile evening, especially in that it will continue the ongoing discussions of genocide and a country’s role in it. With the horrors of Darfur still lingering in the memory and its brutal repercussions to millions, this subject is not closed.