Theater: Guilt Unlimited

Incident at Vichy aims for the playgoer's conscience, but only grabs his lapels. Arthur Miller has written not a drama but a moral lecture on guilt and responsibility as it concerns the mass murder of European Jewry.

The time is September 1942. The place is a detention room in Vichy, France, where Jews are being rounded up for identity checks and circumcision examinations. As they learn but can scarcely credit, they are destined for the crematory furnaces. Miller assembles a doctor, an actor, a painter, an electrician and others, all representative enough to express the playwright's viewpoints, and none real enough to leave the impress of their own specific personalities.

They indulge in rationales of why the inevitable will not occur. It is unthinkable, they tell each other, inefficient, illegal. One by one, they disappear, until only two are left, the doctor and an Austrian prince who has been brought in by mistake. The doctor convicts the aristocratic Gentile of unintended complicity with the whole monstrous crime. "It's not your guilt I want—it's your responsibility," the doctor thunders. Moments later, the prince hands the doctor his own white paper pass to freedom, and stands, erect and alone, facing the irate Nazi sadists.

This ending is untrue to death. It would have been more moving, as well as more accurate, to have the aristocrat leave and the doctor face his fate. Furthermore, the episode subverts the play's moral stance. It is morally impermissible for the doctor to accept his life at the cost of the prince's. Even so, the stagecraft is considerably less faulty than the logic. Miller has written an equation with a missing term—power. Power precedes responsibility. One is not accountable for events that one is powerless to avert or affect.

Everyone would like to erase, or explain, the tragedies of history, but tragedy is by nature inexplicable, unavoidable and irreversible. Arthur Miller proposes that the living atone for the dead. But universal guilt, like universal love, is an abstraction. "What can ever save us?" the prince asks in a moment of anguish. A touch of genuine humility might help. Only God can be responsible for all to all.