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What: UC Davis professor emeritus Pete Hays will discuss Arthur Miller’s play “The Price”

When: 6:20 p.m. Thursday

Where: B Street Theatre, 2711 B St., Sacramento

Info: A performance of the play follows at 7 p.m.; tickets are $23-$35, www.bstreettheatre.org or 915-443-5300

Professor Pete Hays — a mainstay in the English department at UC Davis from 1966 through 2004, who still teaches periodically as an emeritus professor — knows a thing or two about playwright Arthur Miller.

In addition to studying Miller’s plays, “I met Arthur Miller in the 1990s,” Hays recalls. “It was at a theater festival on Prince William Sound in Alaska, where the Exxon Valdez ran aground in late 1980s.”

Hays says Miller was somewhat reserved in one-on-one conversations, as celebrities often are, but quite forthcoming in a Q-and-A session.

“He did tend to shy away from questions about Marilyn,” Hays recalls, referring to actress Marilyn Monroe, who was Miller’s wife from 1956 to 1961.

When Sacramento’s B Street Theatre decided to stage Miller’s drama “The Price” this fall, Hays was recruited to give a pre-performance talk.

“I knew the play, and I like it very much,” Hays says. “The Price” premiered in 1968, enjoyed a successful Broadway run, and was short-listed for the Tony Award for Best Play that year. (The winner was Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”)

Hays says “The Price” is a little bit different from Miller’s earlier, and more frequently staged, plays like “Death of a Salesman” and “The Crucible.” For one thing, “The Price” features only four characters, where those earlier plays called for bigger casts. But the main difference is the playwright’s viewpoint.

“What is important about Miller is that the early plays are much more didactic than the later plays,” Hays says. Miller was interested in moral choices throughout his career, but as he got older, the playwright was less inclined to take sides. “In some of his late plays, he can be extraordinarily vague in terms of who is right, and who is wrong. He deals increasingly in the ambiguity of morality,” Hays explains.

“The Price” centers on two brothers, whose father was wiped out financially in the Depression. One brother dropped out of college, got a job as a cop, and supported the ailing old man. The other brother went to medical school, became a wealthy surgeon and disappeared into the tony suburbs.

The events in the play unfold as the brothers discuss the sale of the now-deceased father’s furniture, which has been stored in an attic for years. The long-separated brothers argue about how much the furniture is worth, and old family disputes resurface, as they slide into an argument about which one made the proper choices during their father’s declining years.

“I will be curious to talk with the audience after they’ve seen the play, to see which brother they think was right,” Hays says.

— Reach Jeff Hudson at [email protected] or 530-747-8055.

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Pete Hays, an emeritus professor of English at UC Davis, will give a pre-performance talk Thursday evening at the B Street Theatre in Sacramento. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo

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