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The Ride Down Mount Morgan
Centering around a protagonist who’s a monumental prick, Miller’s 1991 drama essentially amounts to an apologia for monumental prickishness. Lyman Felt is a successful insurance executive in middle age who’s married his mistress (tough, young, sexy) without bothering to divorce his wife (prim, proper, practical). Though he’s maintained a double life for nine blissful years (shown in flashbacks), it all comes crashing down when he comes crashing down Mount Morgan in his car and both wives show up at his hospital bedside. They are—as you might imagine—upset, but Lyman feels little remorse because, as he repeatedly and rather ruthlessly stresses, having both a sexpot on the one hand and a trusty pal on the other has made him a better husband to both. Or some such nonsense.
Though Miller means for us to recognize Lyman’s selfishness to some degree, he also seems to think the fellow has a point. But whether he has or not, the script’s an over-serious bore, filled with banal yet stilted dialogue, females who remain ciphers, and a disagreeable main character given to self-pity and endless, tortured self-justification.
In Dennison’s interpretation, Lyman seems downright whiny, especially when the actor tries to force an approximation of mental anguish. More successful are Graves and Grandt, who play the two wives with shades of weariness that bring some humanity to otherwise lifeless characters. But, honestly, there’s only so much you can do with a play that manages to suck the fun out of infidelity.
