"Arthur Miller's shrewdly constructed 1967 drama "The Price" lacks the depth of the playwright's greatest work. But in its own seriocomic key and colors, it explores the questions of success and responsibility that haunt nearly all of Miller's plays, including most famously "All My Sons" (1947) and "Death of a Salesman" (1949).

During the second act of the Old Globe production that opened under Rick Seer's direction last week, a trio of actors makes the family squabbles and moral debates of "The Price" suspenseful and enthralling, rather than preachy.

The setting is the attic of a New York brownstone in a once-prosperous neighborhood. The building will soon be torn down. Policeman Victor Franz is here to retrieve or sell what's left of his parents' legacy -- the stolid furniture, sports equipment, even classy clothes left over from better days before the stock market crash of 1929.

After a too-protracted silent prologue, the cop's wife, Esther, joins him and we get the setup. Victor (Andy Prosky) and his mate (Leisa Mather) think he's a failure because he chose to be the caretaker of his widowed, impoverished father. Instead of finishing college, he became a cop and on civil service wages, he (and later, the frustrated, borderline alcoholic Esther) supported the man who had presumably lost all and lived in the attic while others took over the house below.

In his moral superiority, Victor blames his dilemma on the brother from whom he has been estranged since their father's death 16 years ago. Walter Franz refused to help the father or his sibling beyond a paltry $5-a-month stipend. He's now a rich surgeon who doesn't take his brother's calls about disposing of the family legacy cluttering the attic.

(That clutter is carefully rendered at the Globe's temporary Copley Auditorium stage by designer Robin Sanford Roberts.)

So rather than the selfish brother, in walks Solomon, wise as his Biblical namesake and just as old. He's a mostly retired appraiser and antiques dealer who's as savvy about family conflict, choice and responsibility as he is about old furniture.

Unfortunately on opening night, the first act of the "The Price" slowed almost to a halt and created the wrong kind of tension. Instead of entertaining and enlightening with the banter and unexpected wisdom of the seen-it-all Solomon, actor Dominic Chianese, best known as Uncle Junior on "The Sopranos," seemed befuddled and often lost, himself. Was the actor dropping or misremembering lines? Or was his halting, confused delivery a misbegotten interpretive choice?

In any case, the second act was a different story altogether -- a vivid, painfully authentic debate drama, true to the push-pull, love-hate dynamic of so many families, and meticulously rendered by actor James Sutorius who created an elegant, chastened Walter, sparring with Prosky as the honorable, resentful Victor, and Mather as the gently probing (and sometimes inaudible) Esther.

"The Price" premiered on Broadway in 1967 as a one-act with no intermission; Seer, following recent practice, splits the play in two, ending the first with the arrival of Walter, then repeating that dramatic entrance to open the second act.

The surprise is that instead of the selfish monster Victor has depicted, Walter is a tame man, uncomfortably formal at first, who describes his earlier success as personal failure and who has experienced a breakdown and re-integration that have changed his life and values. Now he wants to make amends, a desire Victor considers accepting and thwarting with equal conviction.

Will he risk trusting the brother he long felt betrayed him? Or will her revert to the defensive posture that leaves him defeated, but feeling morally better? Prosky rings many changes in his portrayal of this long-suffering beat cop. He brightens with love when he first sees his brother or speaks of his son at M.I.T. He enlivens again in unguarded in moments as he recalls his youthful passions, his status as parental "favorite." Yet he persistently smolders with the quiet desperation and resentment that's made him old before his time.

The final encounters in the Globe production have the potent, edge-of-your-seat tension of a well-made Ibsen melodrama, with revelation following revelation, each new bit of information about the past kaleidoscopically shifting moral perspective on the brothers in the present. Sutorius delivers another subtly calibrated portrayal in this his third Globe outing.

The play is an allegory of choice, no two ways about it, but the schematic dilemmas here feel authentic and they unfold in the context of Miller's persistent and newly timely critique of capitalism. A great deal in Miller's play feels autobiographical and truly felt.

Like the Franz brothers, Miller was born just before World War I into middle-class comfort, the son of a father who could neither read nor write, yet was a successful manufacturer of ladies' coats. His mother, Gussie, stayed home with her three children, cheerfully playing a well-tuned baby grand and singing "in the happy, slighting hooting soprano so proper and romantic and fashionable."

In his 1987 autobiography "Timebends," Miller goes on to describe the swift changes poverty wrought in his mother. He shows her standing in the light, "diamonds on her fingers, trailing a silver fox across the floor" and promising to bring home the sheet music of the show she and his father are off to see, "Kern or Gershwin or Herbert which she will play the next morning."

Not much later, when they've had to move, he sees her "in the little Brooklyn house where she shuffles about in carpet slippers, sighing, cursing, with a sneer on her lips, weeping suddenly and then catching herselfâ€-."

It's that theme of the underside of capitalism, the after-effects of greed, the cruelty of the system that corrupted and defeated the iconic salesman Willy Loman that reverberates through the Franz brothers' lives -- and, during this latest economic collapse, through our own. In the latter half of the Globe production, those questions take on vigorous dramatic life.

"The Price"

When: 7 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through June 14

Where: The Old Globe at the Copley Auditorium, Balboa Park, San Diego

Tickets: $29-$76; 619-234-5623

Web: oldglobe.org.