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...