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American Master
By Anne Marie Welsh
THEATER CRITIC
March 21, 2004
Dignity, decency, responsibility: Rare enough in any age, these personal traits are also the qualities that make Miller's plays the American bulwarks of world theater.
The 6-foot-3-inch frame is just a bit stooped, but the writer – who speaks in measured tones, with moral clarity and surprising modesty – is still vigorous in his 88th year. He's "back in life," he says, after the death two years ago of his wife of four decades, photographer Inge Morath. And as a writer, Miller is as prolific now as he was in 1949, when "Death of a Salesman" made Willy Loman a cultural icon, his "smile and a shoeshine" indelible symbols of a vanished American Dream.
Miller is in town for this week's Globe opening of "Resurrection Blues," the West Coast premiere of his satiric comedy set in a Latin American dictatorship. The fictional leader-for-life, Felix, is impotent, lecherous and politically desperate. But he has a plan to squelch the opposition in his country, now in its 38th year of civil war. Felix will crucify the rebel leader whom peasants view as their messiah. And if he broadcasts the execution worldwide, the dictator will pocket $25 million from an American advertising agency eager to televise the big event.
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The place would be Shea Stadium and the site, second base. "I started the play after that," he says, his wit so dry it crackles. "I never finished it until it become more and more obvious to me that the thing was less a satire than a description of what was going on."
Since the 2002 premiere of "Resurrection Blues" at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, millions have paid to watch a gory feature film about just such a messianic execution by crucifixion.
"In the old days, Shakespeare's and the 18th century and beyond, executions drew tremendous crowds in London and Paris," says Miller, adding with impeccable timing, "and of course, the lynchings here in America drew big audiences." Miller had yet to read of a recent poll, by the Trio digital network, which found that 67 percent of Americans support the idea of televised executions and 21 percent of that public would pay to see Osama bin Laden put to death.
Life continues to imitate Miller's all-too-contemporary art.
That relevance began after World War II, when Miller and Tennessee Williams and their brilliantly sympathetic director, Elia Kazan, cultivated fertile dramatic ground on Broadway. Eugene O'Neill still lived and wrote, and though his reputation was in decline, he was then privately creating some of his greatest works, including "Long Day's Journey Into Night."
When Miller's "Death of a Salesman" opened at the Morosco Theatre in February 1949, the reviews were rapturous. The prizes arrived in waves (the Tony, Drama Critics Circle and Pulitzer Prize). At 33, Miller's reputation and wealth were both secured.
With "All My Sons" two years before and the still-piercing "Salesman," the playwright had accomplished what James Joyce's Stephen Daedalus set out to do in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Miller had forged in the smithy of his soul the "uncreated conscience" of his country.
And so continues his ongoing debate with America.
Loss and awareness
Miller was born in 1915 on 112th Street on Manhattan's Upper Westside in what is now Harlem. His father, Isadore, who could neither read nor write, was a successful manufacturer of ladies' coats. His mother stayed home with her three children in upper-middle-class comfort. They had an Oriental rug and a well-tuned Knabe baby grand piano. Their son, Art, was an indifferent student, but a good athlete.Then the stock market crashed.
In a marvelous passage in his 1987 autobiography, "Timebends," Miller describes the swift changes poverty unleashed in his mother, Gussie. One moment she is standing with her husband in the light, "diamonds on her fingers, trailing a silver fox across the floor and promises to bring home the sheet music of the show they are off to see."
Not long later, when they've moved many rungs down the social ladder, 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 herself. ... (She makes) meal money at high-stakes professional bridge games all over Flatbush, which are sometimes raided by the police, whom she talks into letting her go home to prepare supper."
From watching Gussie move with the times, her son learned, he says, "the desire to move on, to metamorphose – or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary."
The ambitious young Miller didn't get into the school of his choice, the University of Michigan. But working in garment district warehouses, and setting his sights on being a writer, he boldly wrote to the university president and asked him to take a chance on admitting him. The request was granted and Miller went to Ann Arbor.
While seeing two student drama productions there, he says, he "felt an attraction to that kind of writing. Writing in terms of scenes was very exciting to me. That's where it all started, when I was first exposed to theater."
Clearly, the experience of his family's economic collapse never left him, just as novelist Charles Dickens' imprisonment for debt and forced factory labor inspired his socially conscious novels. Over and over in Miller's work, the underside of capitalism, the aftereffects of greed, the cruelty of a system that corrupted and defeated Willy Loman reverberates in his characters' lives.
When he graduated, he moved home to New York, where he was first able to support himself with $1,250 in prize money and a small salary from the WPA's Federal Theatre Project. His first plays were social in import, but varied in style. An epic drama about Montezuma, "The Golden Years," was an allegory of Hitler's rise to power while a passive public watched.
"The Man Who Had All the Luck," a gripping if flawed fable about the place of fate in success, did open in New York in 1944, but ran just four performances. (Recent revivals in Los Angeles, New York and London revealed its considerable strengths.)
Then, in 1946, "All My Sons" was an immediate hit with audiences and critics, its story of a son discovering the moral failings of his father who sold fatally defective airplane parts. It's a piece that's done frequently, especially, Miller says, "as now, during times of war."
"Death of a Salesman" came next and was soon praised worldwide as the most truly American play ever written, a dramatic capsule of the nation's unresolved conflict between idealism and materialism.
The play is so beautifully crafted, it's easy to forget how Miller broke through the conventions of realism to show simultaneous time onstage. Jobless and confused, Willy wanders about in his own memory, second-guessing his younger self's bad choices. Flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness scenes are seamlessly joined to the realistic surface; audiences go with the flow.
Some producers worried, though, and more than one, Miller says, asked him to excise those expressionistic passages before the Broadway opening. "They thought no one would understand it. You really have to go deaf at a certain point," he says. "You do what you've done and then you go deaf."
His 1953 "The Crucible," an allegory about the Salem witch-hunts, was written in impassioned response to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's investigations of accused subversives, and was followed by the potent, Brooklyn-set "A View From the Bridge" (1955), about the doomed Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone. Miller was seeking "tragedy in the heart and spirit of the average man."
It was during this period that Miller met and (after divorcing his first wife, Mary Slattery) married Marilyn Monroe. As his association with Hollywood continued, he was drawn into the House Un-American Activities Committee's orbit. Called to testify, he was sentenced to prison for refusing to become an informer as his friend Kazan did. The sentence was eventually quashed, but his passport was revoked and for nine years, no new play by Arthur Miller opened in the United States.
By the 1960s, with Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" having introduced American audiences to an existential brand of revolt and to the new European absurdism, Miller's star was beginning to dim – just as O'Neill's had long before his death, and Williams' had too.
Some of the most withering reviews of Miller's career greeted his return to the stage with "After the Fall" (1964). Because the play seemed to draw so heavily from his marriage to Monroe, many New York critics felt it exploited their relationship so soon after her death as to be crudely insensitive. European productions, however, have more recently been praised for Miller's attempt to link the private marital issues confronting his hero, Quentin, with the public issues involving the Holocaust and the HUAC.
Miller looks quietly pleased to report that director Michael Mayer, whose 1998 revival of "A View From the Bridge" was so revelatory, is reviving the experimental "After the Fall" this fall. During the 1960s, only "The Price" (1968) earned strong reviews in New York. A string of subsequent works – "The Creation of the World and Other Business" (1972), "The Archbishop's Ceiling" (1977), through to "Broken Glass" (1994) – all fared better in England than here.
But a Miller resurgence began in New York with Dustin Hoffman's surprisingly moving Broadway production of "Death of a Salesman" in 1984. Successively during the 1990s came high-profile revivals of "All My Sons" (another is slated for this summer), "The Crucible" and Mayer's "A View From the Bridge" with Anthony LaPaglia, which Miller reports will "soon be made into a film; the screenplay is already done."
Then came 50th anniversary productions of "Salesman" all over the country, including a San Diego Rep staging with Mike Genovese, and Chicago's Goodman Theatre offering with Brian Dennehy, Elizabeth Franz and Howard Witt; it took home the 1999 Tony for Best Revival. The Globe staging is the third regional production of "Resurrection Blues," and "Finishing the Picture" is next on the itinerant Miller's agenda, set for a Chicago premiere this September.
While his popular reputation waxed and waned, Miller did anything but retire from public life. He continued to defend liberal causes and intellectual freedoms. As president of PEN International, the writers' organization, he championed dissident artists and intellectuals in China, the Soviet Union, Turkey and Czechoslovakia (where one of those dissident playwrights, Vaclav Havel, later became president). He reported from the violence-wracked 1968 Democratic convention and was a delegate to the Miami convention that chose George McGovern as its candidate in 1972. He defended performance artist Karen Finley and three gay colleagues against the congressional smut brigades that rescinded their grants and eventually eviscerated the National Endowment for the Arts.
He and Morath, along with his friend, the novelist William Styron, and others, visited Cuba. Miller's balanced response – disappointment in Castro's oppressive regime; skepticism about the ethics and practical effects of the U.S embargo – appeared in the liberal journal the Nation just two months ago.
There remains one area of his life Miller famously won't discuss – his affair and four-year-long marriage to Monroe. One reporter for the New York Daily News learned that the hard way. Asking a smarmy question about whether the playwright still dreamed about Monroe, Miller, then 80, decked the questioner with a glancing blow that sent him skidding across the buffet table at a Town Hall celebration.
But if that incident, reported in the New York Times, suggests unresolved feelings about his troubled second marriage, Miller is about to approach the loaded subject again in the new play. "Finishing the Picture," says the Goodman's publicity material, is the story of a film director who nearly shuts down a picture when an unstable movie star creates havoc – in Nevada, where, in fact, Monroe filmed the Miller-scripted, marriage-ending "The Misfits."
In person, Miller is courtly, far from the finger-waving moralist described by the right-wing cultural press. And he's far more adventurous artistically than his reputation would have him. Miller has a simple explanation for the latter misapprehension: "Maybe I wasn't seen as experimental because most of my experiments worked."
On the current political scene, he notes a shift. "Even the Republicans don't seem to be quite as happy with this kind of music. I think that what's at the bottom of the disillusionment now is that nobody likes being lied to."
And thus, Arthur Miller gently nudges the conversation back to "Resurrection Blues." He points out that "the play, of course, is dealing with delusionary matters that have come to seem so persuasive and ordinary.
"It's all a poem," he says, quoting the character Henri, the dictator's cousin in "Resurrection Blues." Henri has left his pharmaceutical company to become a philosopher and now insists that all too many wars are fought over fictions. Miller wrote Henri's key speech long before weapons of mass destruction turned up nonexistent in Iraq.
"The Vietnam War," according to Henri, "was set off, mind you, by a night attack upon a United States warship by a Vietnamese gunboat in the Gulf of Tonkin. It's now quite certain that the attack never happened. This was a fiction, a poem; but 58,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese had to die before the two sides got fed up reciting it."
"All My Sons," director Elia Kazan (1947, Tony Award). In San Diego:
Old Globe, directed by Richard Seer (2002), with Daniel J. Travanti.