Wounds That Will Not Heal

By RICHARD CORLISS

AFTER THE FALL by Arthur Miller

In the old joke, a monk, asked why he flagellates himself, replies, "Because it feels so good when I stop." The flagellant who would be an artist has a higher motive: "Because the welts I raise make such attractive and meaningful designs." After the Fall, whose original production opened the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in 1964, is a 2 1/2-hour act of flagellation in which Arthur Miller's whips sear his own flesh and that of anyone he touched or who touched him. Two decades later, in John Tillinger's streamlined, harrowing off-Broadway revival, the scars of passion and pain still show. The wounds this play opened will not heal.

One must ask, though, whether After the Fall's lingering impact is a matter of artistry or indecent exposure. In the late 1950s Miller was a prince among Broadway playwrights, but west of the Hudson he was less than a prince consort; he was Mr. Marilyn Monroe. For the 4 1/2 years of their marriage, the egghead and the sex goddess were headliners in every tattling tabloid, and their divorce in 1961 hardly stilled the clucking, for the next year Monroe was dead from an overdose of barbiturates. Miller must have found this stardom by proxy offensive. Yet in a way, After the Fall accedes readily enough to the demands of celebrity: Tell us all, tell us the worst, tell us more than we think we want to know. Although Quentin, the play's protagonist, is a lawyer, and Maggie, his second wife, is a pop singer, the veils quickly fall. Fiction is revealed as self-pitying psychodrama, and Miller's descent into himself risks being taken as a wallow in metaphysical sleaze.

If the sleaze factor is immediately evident, so is the metaphysics. Quentin is, after all, having a confessional chat with God as the play begins. John Lee Beatty's set is furnished with the spare elegance of a waiting room in limbo; the back wall suggests an opaque view of the hell one creates with other people. Quentin's inferno has been stoked by his belief that love in its modern forms -- friendship, political idealism, familial responsibility, courtly lust -- can conquer all. As he discovers in remembered scenes with his dying father, his doting scold of a mother, his colleagues in fair and foul weather, his bitter first wife and Maggie, love conquers nothing but the lover. It drains him, proves him inadequate, drives him toward madness. Suffocated by Maggie's whims and paranoia, Quentin cannot feel even that signal emotion of the nice guy: guilt. He can only expel his last vestige of feeling when she pleads, "Just love me. And do what I tell ya." What more -- or less -- does anyone want?

As Quentin, Frank Langella at first seems too sensuous to be playing the kind of man who sins only so he can suffer. By the second act, however, when Quentin is mud wrestling with Maggie's demons and making them his own, Langella has captured the character's soul; he is stooped, obsessive, spent. As Maggie, Dianne Wiest is an inspired piece of miscasting.

Luminous earlier this year in Serenading Louie and Other Places, Wiest is still no sexpot, no Marilyn; truth to tell, Langella is prettier than she is. More over, she affects a wispy giggle that mimics Monroe and every little girl lost from Susan Alexander Kane to Judy Garland. Yet Wiest has managed to bleach the intelligence out of her face, leaving only a cunning child with the look of a battered seraph. This is no flesh-and-blood performance; it is pure, chilling marrow. Emotional striptease is what such acting is all about. But perhaps not play writing.