What drives each of the three works is memory, and how it can twist or reveal the truth, making unreliable narrators of us all. Victor Franz (Mark Ruffalo) is a fortyish N.Y.C. police sergeant whose body and handsome face sag a little with regret.

He has returned to a brownstone in Manhattan-it sags, too-that’s about to be demolished it was his childhood home. He lived there with his brother Walter (Tony Shalhoub) and their now dead parents. Victor slowly enters an old room filled with the relics of the past-a Victrola, chairs, a breakfront, and so on-and, of course, he is bemused and rueful and sad as he walks down memory lane, sometimes touching a piece of old furniture, or listening to a scratchy old record, because this is a realistic play by Arthur Miller, the author of “All My Sons” (1947) and “Death of a Salesman” (1949), elegies about hope made corrupt by the exigencies of living, and about how the past pulls at the present. Victor’s slim, dark-haired wife, Esther (Jessica Hecht), walks in on her partner laughing along with a laughing record, one of those novelty disks where two men try to have a conversation without cracking up. Victor doesn’t answer her when she asks him what’s up with all that instead, he focusses on the drink that Esther’s holding. She’s just had one, she says, a trifle defensively. There’s a little rancor in her voice, and shyness, too: like many a Miller heroine, she loves her guy because of his various complications but she’s a little afraid of him, too. Anyway, Esther thinks it’s creepy to hang out in this space, home to so much pain. She wants to get out, go to the movie he’s promised to take her to, anything.

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