Incident At Vichy

photo: Steve Kunken

While not from the playwright's top drawer, this one-act strongly bears his unmistakable stamp: you know you're in Arthur Miller territory when characters turn to each other and say things like "We have learned the price of idealism". The play - in which a line of men await questioning in Nazi-occupied France with the gradual realization of their fate - is wordy and creaky, but its arguments are world sized and timeless, and it can work well enough if there is sufficient gravity and tension on stage. Unfortunately that's exactly what's lacking in this production by The Actors Company: the stakes haven't been raised to life-or-death level, so the actors too often sound like they are making the playwright's speeches rather than struggling to make sense of humanity.