OAKLAND CENTER FOR THE ARTS 'The Price' cast delivers a fine performance

The Arthur Miller drama centers on family relationships.
YOUNGSTOWN -- Sibling rivalry has a way of getting ugly, especially when brothers who have been estranged for 16 years get together and try to resolve old feelings.
That is the premise of Arthur Miller's "The Price," which opened Friday night at the Oakland Center for the Performing Arts in front of a sparse crowd of about 40 people.
It's too bad not more attended as director W. Rick Schilling has put together a more than competent cast, which delivers a fine performance throughout the two-act, nearly 21/2 hour show.
Though not as well known as other Miller plays, such as the often produced "The Crucible," "Death of a Salesman" and "All My Sons," "The Price" offers yet another tale of relationships and how human nature forces people to look at things through their own lens.
Set in 1968 in a Manhattan brownstone apartment, the story develops slowly, sometimes too slowly, which is a criticism of the script, not the actors.
The plot
It's the story of Victor Franz (played by Joe Mineo), who never finished college, thus giving up on a career as a scientist, to take care of his father who lost everything during the stock market crash. Instead, he becomes a beat cop.
Along with his wife Esther (played by Regina Reynolds), he cares for his father while his brother Walter (played by Glenn Stevens) shirks his duties at home and goes on to be a prominent physician.
Along for the ride is antique appraiser Gregory Solomon (played by David Waldman), who is thrilled, at 89 years old, to be back in the business. He steals the show in the first act, shooting off one-liners and making those in the audience laugh on more than one occasion.
The second act centers on the relationship between Victor and his brother Walter. It gets a little cumbersome when Esther and Solomon add their dialogue to the scenes. The actors missed a few cues and stepped on each other a little, but it didn't hinder the performance.
Stevens is believable as the wealthy brother Walter, and as the second act unfolds we discover that Walter has his own troubles.
Reynolds does a fine job as Victor's wife Esther, who is dealing with her own struggles and choices.
But the star of the show is Mineo, who initially just wants the whole thing over, taking whatever the appraiser will offer, but by the end of the play wants more than just money -- he wants answers. His angst is real.
In the end, the audience realizes that many of Victor's internal struggles centered around perception versus reality. And that everything in life centers around choices.