Attention Must Be Paid

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: THE LAST YANKEE

AUTHOR: ARTHUR MILLER

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: The subject is neurosis, but this chamber play from an old master gives cause for celebration.

Theater is, at heart, just people in a big room trying to talk -- the characters with one another, the playwright with the audience.

Arthur Miller has been at it, listening and talking, for a half-century; the author of Death of a Salesman knows the stage's limits by now. In his poignant new play, The Last Yankee, he takes as his subject things the theater has a hard time showing: the outdoors on a glorious New England morning, and the inside of a woman's complicated mind. And he has stripped his story -- of a man visiting his wife, who has been hospitalized for depression -- down to its chassis, to certain private conversations in two scenes of one act. Then he refines it further. This one-hour drama is not traditional drama at all, because the characters have already changed before we meet them. And it is less a dialogue than a monologue. In the wonderful character of Patricia Hamilton, we hear a troubled soul having a chat with itself.

Patricia (radiant Frances Conroy) seems more manic than depressive today. She has gone without her medication for three weeks, and is ready, maybe, to go home to her husband Leroy (stalwart John Heard) and their seven kids. Patricia wants Leroy, a carpenter who is descended from Alexander Hamilton, to be more successful and less complacent. And she seeks release from the ghosts of her golden youth. But wry or wistful, she speaks with the reckless lucidity of someone liberated from drugs and intoxicated by the impending peril of real life. "Sooner or later you just have to stand up and say, 'I'm normal, I made it,' " she says. "But it's like standing on top of a stairs, and there's no stairs."

Leroy built the stairs. But even this dogged optimist, who says he is "only a dumb swamp Yankee," can see that his wife's "eyes are full of disappointment." Yes, in him -- a reproach tempered by Patricia's realization that he has stayed, through 20 years of her illness, because he remembers her as she was and could be again. Now he wants her to live for something more than gratitude: "You just have to love this world."

In John Tillinger's intimate, immaculate staging, The Last Yankee plays like a last contrition -- with a bit of sermon thrown in. Miller has been in the pulpit so long that he can't completely shake the preacher's jeremiad cadences from his voice, even when he wants to whisper. When Leroy says, "Maybe I am a failure, but in my opinion no more than the rest of this country," his private anguish is being overrun by Miller's political agenda, like a radio sonata interrupted by a campaign commercial.

Still, no one can blame Miller for being himself -- not when he lets a spirit as rich and individual as Patricia's think out loud in a big room. And not when he has refined his best artistic tendencies. Mature artists often simplify, discard the old frills, decide what's important. Miller is 77 now; he has nothing to prove but much to tell, in a few words. The Last Yankee qualifies as prime old-man's art. It is just a sketch, really -- some lines that reveal the contours of a soul. In his final days, Matisse did work like this.