Academy captures sweep of Depression story

“I don’t see anything, I don’t hear anything except money, money, money,” says housewife Rose Baum, played with stirring eloquence by Nikole York, in Arthur Miller’s “The American Clock.”

Baum anchors Miller’s episodic vaudeville play about the 1929 stock market crash and how the Great Depression affected various aspects of American life.

In a sweeping presentation by the Las Vegas Academy Theatre, York’s is one of many performances given by a cast so focused and mature that it’s hard to believe it’s made up of high school students.

The show is not without its problems. Miller’s difficult script, loosely based on the oral histories of Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times,” is a series of often unrelated vignettes and musical interludes that don’t always jell together.

The unemotional first act is more about the onslaught of the Depression and people’s numb reactions to it. The company had trouble getting its footing on opening night. But patience is rewarded with a second act that narrows the story in on the Baum family and their painful unraveling through the growing emotional intensity of the principal performers.

The Baums are a stand-in for Miller’s own family and its struggles in this semi-autobiographical tale. Mother Rose, Father Moe (a nicely understated, growingly dejected Samuel Garnett) and son Lee (an ever optimistic Jacob Langsner) are an upper-middle class family living the good life in Manhattan. Like many other Americans, Moe has much of his money wrapped up in the stock market.

The idea is that everyone is wealthy, but as omniscient narrator Arthur A. Robertson (the finely stoic Brady McDonald) says, “The market represents nothing but a state of mind.” It’s not a reality, the money doesn’t exist, and similar to what has happened and continues to happen during our Great Recession, the result is devastating to individual lives.

We see this despair as the play takes us through the lives of starving farmers and white-collar executives like Theodore K. Quinn (played with tongue-in-cheek irony by Adam Araujo). The African-American experience is soulfully captured by train-jumping hobo Banks (an elegant turn by Tariq James) and solidarity champion Irene (the exquisite singer Carrington Peterson). Underneath it all plays music by the likes of Gerswhin from an onstage band, peppy on the surface yet doleful underneath.

Director Holly Morris thankfully doesn’t let the show veer into unrelenting melodrama. But the underlying mood of melancholy that should pervade the production often isn’t there.

The spare production design, by John Morris, splits the playing space in half with the colorful Speakeasy on one side quietly humming as the drama unfolds, and a raked series of stone steps on the other serving as various locales.

A backdrop featuring an intermittent slideshow of desperate, nomadic Americans, their shantytowns and, finally, the outbreak of World War II is used to great emotional effect, but it would be nice to have more of it.

The huge ensemble cast of 50-plus is a talented bunch. Standouts include the comical Ireland Ciechalski as Fanny Margolies and Adam Engle as her goofy son Sidney; Aviana Glover as Doris, Parker Sachs as Joe, and Courtney Kraemer as Edie.