currently starring in
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
In a boast to his lawyer, Lyman Felt, the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, says, “I may be a bastard, but I’m not a hypocrite.” It’s one of the declarations he makes that could be regarded as something to enter into his personal plus-column. But that and whatever else can be said in the guy’s favor–at 54, he’s full of athletic sexuality–doesn’t add up to enough for the people in his life to give two hoots about what happens to him.
Lyman (Patrick Stewart) is exactly what his given name implies. He’s a man who lies. Also, he is lying in a hospital bed as the result of totaling his Porsche on an ice-covered mountain road, and he has lied to his two–count ’em, two–wives, allowing each to think that she’s the only spouse he has. First-wife Theo (Frances Conroy) has been thinking it for a few decades; second-wife Leah (Katy Selverstone) has been thinking it for the nine years since Lyman he told her he finalized a divorce so he could marry her.
But while the Lyman part fits who he is, the Felt part doesn’t. If the remorseless bigamist has ever felt anything other than amorphous desire, it’s restricted to the desire for an overwhelming sense of satisfaction with himself. Theo and Leah and his children, Bessie (via Theo) and Benjamin (via Leah), are expected to make do with what they get, because Lyman is a man who mistakes randy impulses as sensitivity to others. Though he’s one of the world’s biggest takers, he believes he’s giving of himself, showing by example how rich and exciting, unpredictable and adventurous life can be. He’s a man who instructs those who orbit him with the two rules he follows: “Never trust anybody and never forgive.”
Miller tells Lyman’s resentment-provoking story in a non-linear fashion. It’s been a formula for him since he found, in Death of a Salesman, that juggling timeframes can be an effective approach to enlivening a potentially plodding narrative. By the time Miller conjured After the Fall, the fictionalized account of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, he was comfortable sequencing scenes as they might pass through someone’s frenzied mind. With The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, which is a kind of tepid After the Fall (though definitely a few notches above his recent Mr. Peters’ Connections), he fills in Lyman’s biography by jumping from the Clearhaven Memorial Hospital to places on the map as far away geographically as Africa and as far away mentally as a man’s most addled hallucination might stray.
The intention is to give accounts of Lyman’s simultaneous marriages as well as to offer some view of him from his wives’ perspectives. But though Miller says he’s worked on this drama longer than he has on any of his other plays and has made many revisions since a 1998 New York Shakespeare Festival production which also featured Stewart, he still hasn’t solved the core problem: Lyman. What piques Miller’s interest in such a man is obvious, since the playwright has always been intrigued by men whose self-confidence–whether real or adapted–has landed them in situations far less lofty than they had hoped to attain. But Lyman is such a blowhard–not to mention such a humongous fool for imagining he could get away with his marital scam forever–that there’s no caring about what befalls him. And, since he’s shy of the ingredient that rivets audiences to Willy in Death of a Salesman or Eddie in A View From the Bridge, how much leeway can we persuaded to give a gasbag who never trusts anybody, never forgives, and only compounds the unattractiveness of his fulsome attitude by insisting that “the first rule of life is betrayal”?
