Arthur Miller’s reputation and stature as one of the three greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century has rested primarily on only two plays he wrote within a four-year period: Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, which premiered in 1949 and 1953, respectively. However, while accumulating approximately sixty years of productions around the world as well as critical attention and acclaim, the two plays have overshadowed much of Miller’s other dramatic work. His writing career spanned sixty-eight years and encompassed many other plays, with, on average, four to six written every decade. Some of his plays have received critical recognition; those that have not fared well critically nonetheless reflect Miller’s persistent themes and formal experimentation. If he had not written another play after Death of a Salesman, Miller’s significance as a playwright still would have endured. In a 1998 poll of eight hundred theater professionals asked by the Royal National Theatre (Lahr, “Making” 49) to nominate significant twentieth-century plays, of the 188 writers nominated, Miller ranked as the most frequently nominated playwright, and Salesman was named the second most significant of the 377 plays nominated (“NT2000”). However, as Miller stated in an interview, not writing “would be like cutting my heart out” (Bigsby, Companion 182).
The works of the other two members of the American playwriting triumvirate, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, reside primarily in the psychological worlds of their characters, varied though those worlds are. Miller’s drama, in contrast, weds the psychological with the social, and therein lies one of the largest critical challenges for his plays and their productions. In his plays, Miller persistently asserts what many American critics and audiences have viewed as political challenges, and, as Jesus is quoted as saying in the New Testament, “No man can be a prophet in his own country.” The thought and courage—some might say the artistic audacity—that led Miller to shine a light on war profiteering a mere two years after the end of World War II, to criticize the American Dream and capitalism during a period of economic growth, and to compare the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee with the Salem witch trials, as well as his willingness to write from his personal life, including reflections of his original family, his father’s loss of wealth during the Great Depression, and his marriages, opened the door for personal scrutiny, at times distracting critics and audiences from focusing on the plays themselves. That Miller’s intent was to distill the essence of these issues, events, and people to their universal elements has not always been recognized or appreciated. The lens Miller holds up through his plays has often been distorted by audiences and critics alike, and this, combined with reports and rumors about the playwright’s political leanings, has detracted, to a certain degree, from his critical success. However, as critics, including Christopher Bigsby in this volume, have pointed out, the universality of Miller’s work has been borne out in productions around the world, and Miller’s stature as a playwright has been greater abroad than in the United States.
Beyond plot and theme, Miller’s experiments with dramatic form require a flexibility and design onstage that critics and the public have not always accepted or embraced. On one hand, when Miller strayed from realism or naturalism, critics pounced on his departure, criticizing his efforts because they did not fit with his previous work; on the other hand, when Miller revisited themes and characters, he was criticized as repetitious and it was suggested that his playwriting days were effectively behind him. While he credited the Greek playwrights and the nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen as foundations for his work, Miller also sought forms that would allow expression of his themes, stream of consciousness, and “timebending.” Though some critics, even after his death, have persisted in labeling him a realist or naturalist, Miller’s plays elude any clear categorization, instead embracing elements of realism, naturalism, expressionism, impressionism, surrealism, minimalism, and abstract symbolism. Other critics have recognized Miller’s explorations of dramatic form, which were encouraged and enhanced by the European designers and American film directors with whom he collaborated. For his part, Miller recognized the narrow expectations of American theatrical audiences and attempted, through both his plays and his essays, to enlarge the parameters of form and content on the stage to make them capable of embracing his thematic preoccupations: guilt, responsibility, illusions, dreams, family, betrayal, the “birds coming home to roost” (Bigsby, Company 49), and success and failure in capitalistic America.
Miller never saved the reviews of his plays and often lambasted critics for their myopic preference for so-called realism and their predilection for treating theater primarily as entertainment. Over the course of his career, however, he received a number of prestigious awards: Miller garnered a Pulitzer Prize, seven Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre (Tony Awards), two New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, an Off-Broadway Theater Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, an Academy Award, an Emmy Award, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. In 2002, Spain awarded him the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, calling him the “undisputed master of modern drama.”
In 1934, having saved money by working at various jobs, including one in an automobile parts warehouse, Miller appealed the rejection of his initial application to attend the University of Michigan because he heard the university gave prizes for writing, specifically the prestigious Avery Hopwood Award in playwriting (Bigsby, Company 23, 25). His later belief that playwrights are born, not made (or trained), ostensibly arose from his own success. Having reportedly seen only one or two plays and having to ask a friend who lived down the hall during his first college Easter vacation how long an act was (Miller, Timebends 211), Miller wrote his first play, No Villain, which won the coveted award in 1936. His second play, Honors at Dawn, won the next year, and The Great Disobedience earned second place the following year. He rewrote No Villain, titling it They Too Arise, in 1937, and with it won the Theater Guild Bureau of New Plays Award; he revised the work yet again under the title The Grass Still Grows in 1939 (Bigsby, Companion xiv). The No Villain versions set the stage for one of Miller’s perpetual themes: a father and his two sons unwittingly find themselves in conflict over socialist and capitalist points of view, and the sociopolitical issues threaten to destroy the family. He thus achieved an early integration of the social and personal themes that would mark his later plays. Honors at Dawn focused more on the conflicts between two brothers, one of whom represented socialism and the other capitalism. The Great Disobedience, which addressed the need for prison reform, also set the stage for later plays that dealt with specific social problems. Structurally, these student plays reflect the impact of Miller’s original influences, namely, the ancient Greek playwrights and Ibsen.
In 1939, Miller began to write radio plays to earn money, the best known of which are The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man, William Ireland’s Confession, The Four Freedoms, Grandpa and the Statue, The Story of Gus, The Guardsman, and Three Men on a Horse (Bigsby, File 59-60). Miller followed the four plays he wrote in the 1930s with six more in the 1940s. With the undergraduate awards under his belt, he next wrote two plays under the Federal Theatre Project: the first, coauthored with Norman Rosten in 1939, was titled Listen My Children; and the second, The Golden Years, was written in 1940. The project ended, however, and the latter play had to wait until 1987 for its radio broadcast on the BBC in England and until 1990 for its first theatrical production. The Golden Years was Miller’s first use of historical metaphor to address current political threats; in the play, Hernán Cortés’s conquest and destruction of the Aztecs were intended to shed light on the West’s initial disbelief and inaction as Adolf Hitler gained power in Europe. Miller’s next play, The Half-Bridge, written from 1941 to 1943 (Bigsby, Companion 43) and set on a ship during World War II, remains, like his undergraduate plays, unpublished and unproduced.
During this time, Miller also began his foray into nonfiction and fiction writing. A collection of reportage on World War II soldiers was published as Situation Normal in 1944, and he completed his only published novel, Focus, which addresses anti-Semitism and fascism, in 1945. The novel had sold ninety thousand copies by the time Salesman premiered in 1949 (Miller, “Brooklyn” 12). However, neither the novel nor its eventual film adaptation in 2001 attracted much critical acclaim. After being criticized at times for supposedly avoiding writing from a Jewish sensibility, Miller wrote Broken Glass (1994), his only other work that deals overtly with a Jewish theme.
More significant in terms of his playwriting is that in 1945 Miller completed the first of his ten one-act plays, That They May Win, which centered on the financial difficulties of a returning World War II veteran and his wife. Finally, in 1944, Miller gathered material for a screenplay, The Story of G.I. Joe, but withdrew from the project before filming began (Miller, Timebends 288).
Miller’s foray into Broadway theater came on November 23, 1944, with The Man Who Had All the Luck. Featuring two brothers—as four of Miller’s student plays did and six of his later ones would—Luck centers on the guilt of one brother over his undeserved luck as the other fails to become a professional baseball player despite his rigorous training under their father. A father’s differing treatment of his supportive and prodigal sons would be a theme Miller would return to in later plays. Using the play’s title for their own pithy evaluations, critics were less impressed with the play itself than they were with the promise shown by the new, twenty-nine-year-old playwright. The play closed after only four performances but won the Theatre Guild National Award. Critics pointed out what was to become Miller’s challenge: “to focus his plot and his characters so that a clear dramatic image will be created,” as critic George Freedley wrote in the New York Daily Telegraph. Failing to appreciate Miller’s desire and attempt to bring something new to the American stage, and reflecting the staid state of American theater in the 1940s, critics articulated what would remain their primary complaints about Miller’s writing: it was too complex, with too many ideas and story lines, and too philosophical and political. As would later critics, some found his work melodramatic and did not like that the play so directly asserted ethics and principles.
Miller’s response was one of both disappointment and determination. He felt that the play had failed in part because of its lengthy scenic changes and determined “never again [to have] anybody move scenery in any play of his” (Miller, “Brooklyn” 11). He also decided that if he did not succeed with his next playwriting effort, he would abandon the craft (Miller, Plays 16); in hindsight, however, it is doubtful that he would have done so. Fortunately, both for the man who believed one was born to be a playwright and for the American theater, Miller’s next attempt did succeed on Broadway three years later.
Opening on January 29, 1947, and running for 328 performances, All My Sons was much more unified than the plays that preceded it, but it retained a strong political element. In the play, two sons are destroyed by their father’s selfish decision to ship faulty airplane parts in order to keep his business flourishing, a decision responsible for the deaths of twenty-one pilots during World War II. Miller avoided any changes of scenery, utilizing a single setting; the various characters congregate in the Kellers’ backyard as the familial tragedy unfolds. Once again intersecting the public with the private, examining morals and political challenges, Miller took a risk by offering this play, which exposed the profiteering and immorality of business that occurred alongside the military’s courage and heroism, only two years after the war had unified the country.
Brooks Atkinson, in a review for The New York Times, remarked that Miller had distinguished himself as “a genuine new talent” with the “honest, forceful drama” (“Play”). He praised the play’s “pithy yet unselfconscious dialogue” and vivid characters, calling the work “a piece of expert dramatic construction. Mr. Miller has woven his characters into a tangle of plot that springs naturally out of the circumstances of life today.” Not all critics were so positive in their responses, however. Richard Watts, Jr., writing for the New York Post, qualified his praise, saying that while the play has “force and passion,” the story is “uneven,” even “clumsy.” He also found the “symbolism and social crusading” unwieldy and overwrought. Ward Morehouse, in a review for The Sun, asserted that the play had too many plot threads (Bigsby, File 17-19).
Although with this new play Miller had certainly simplified the issues raised and the structure of the work in comparison with his earlier plays, it still proved too complex for some. Morehouse and other critics asked him to explain his play, which he did in a piece written for The New York Times (Miller, Timebends 134). Critics have also criticized as implausible the scene in the play in which Ann reveals Larry’s letter, but Miller compared this device to the coincidence inherent to the Greek drama Oedipus (134). Miller later wrote that with All My Sons, he “had exhausted [his] interest in Greco-Ibsen form” (144).
Miller credited Brooks Atkinson for the success of All My Sons and for Miller’s subsequent recognition as a playwright intent on making theater socially relevant as well as entertaining (Timebends 138). The play earned Miller the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and remains one of his strongest and best-known works. It was soon produced in Europe, and even as late as 1977, a production in Israel broke all previous box-office records there. Ironically, even as he earned money from the production of his first Broadway success, Miller returned to his working-class roots, deciding to accept a minimum-wage factory job; his experience, however, was short-lived, though his desire to stay in touch with people from whom he could create characters and his sense of the moral remained (Miller, Timebends 138-39).
The success of All My Sons established Miller as a new playwright and gave him permission, once again, to attempt a new dramatic structure that included multiple settings, time shifts, and complex philosophical and political ideas on the stage. Miller set about writing his next play, Death of a Salesman, the play on which his reputation as a major playwright rests most prominently. Reportedly, since the work’s premiere, there has never been a night without a performance of Salesman somewhere in the world. More critical books and articles have been written about Salesman than about any other of Miller’s plays. The first act was written in twenty-four hours, the second in the following six weeks. However, it was an idea that had been germinating for years; at the age of seventeen, Miller had written a two-page short story, “In Memoriam,” about a downtrodden salesman (Lahr, “Birth” 110).
The play premiered on February 10, 1949, and, despite the producers’ fear that a title with “death” in it would mean certain death for the production, it ran for 742 performances. Neither the title nor the play’s complexity prevented audiences from buying tickets or critics from raving about Miller’s new drama. The producers also feared that the audience might not follow the story or the play’s frequent time shifts; however, Jo Mielziner’s set design, which allowed most locations to be on the stage simultaneously, with only set pieces quickly rolled on and off for the remainder, and his lighting design, which included techniques to denote the time changes, enabled audiences to follow the stream-of-conscious, fluid play and prevented the long scenery changes Miller had come to loathe. Alex North’s music, which utilized leitmotifs, and minor costume changes also helped audiences to recognize the story’s time changes.
The instant success of Salesman changed Miller’s life immediately. He wrote later in his 1987 autobiography Timebends that as the reviews were coming in, on the drive home from the theater on opening night he and his wife could already feel the difference between them (193). Critics were nearly unanimous in their praise of Salesman; Howard Barnes recognized that Miller had “grown enormously in artistic stature since All My Sons,” and Watts stated his belief that Miller’s promise as a budding playwright had been fulfilled. All aspects of the production were applauded. Kappo Phelan acknowledged that the work was both experimental and classical, praising the writing and the “extraordinary performances.” Boyd Martin, writing for the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal, stated that “as a production, it is unique and almost stylized …[the] setting imaginative and elastic,…direction vital and fluid,…[and] cast superb,” going on to say that the play was poetic and both an artistic and popular hit; he concluded that “as a playwright [Miller could] be looked to with keen anticipation in the future.” Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times considered Salesman “one of the finest dramas in the whole of the American theater,” commenting on the masterly direction and Lee J. Cobb’s heroic performance as Willy Loman (“Death”). He continued, “Miller has accomplished some remarkable things,” adding that the play and staging were “daring and experimental.” Howard Barnes, writing for The New York Herald Tribune, concurred, calling Salesman “a great play of our day,” with “majesty, sweep and shattering dramatic impact,” “consummately performed.”
Cue magazine named Salesman the best play of 1948-49 season with “a production of [the] highest caliber.” The play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Tony Award (over Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire) and earned Miller his one Pulitzer Prize. Later, its television adaptations in 1966, 1985, and 2000 would receive Emmy nominations. The original production had audience members weeping and, perhaps, even affected certain social conditions. After one performance, for example, Miller learned that, after seeing the play, “Bernard Gimbel, head of the department store chain,…gave an order that no one in his stores was to be fired for being overage” (Timebends 191).
John Chapman of the Daily News predicted that “everybody…[would] have much more to say about” Salesman in the coming years, and they have (“Death”). The play has been produced worldwide over the past sixty years—Miller directed it himself in China and Sweden—proving its versatility across cultures and countries as well as its universality. Even in China, as Miller wrote in his book “Salesman” in Beijing in 1984, where footballs, punching bags, and large refrigerators were foreign to actors and audience members alike, audiences understood well the pressure of fathers on sons and the expectations and failures that exist in a strict social system.
The fiftieth-anniversary production, imported from the Goodman Theatre in Chicago to Broadway, utilized revolves and cubes that swung in and out of the darkness in a set designed by Mark Wendland. (Revolves had first been used to stage the play by designer Fran Thompson at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1996.) Chicago critics thought the Goodman production, which extended its sold-out run, to be a landmark, and Ben Brantley called it “rare and splendid [with an] interpretation that rejuvenate[d] a classic.” Chris Jones of Variety recognized the production’s “post-modern concept”; Brantley found the sets “miraculously fluid”; and Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune commented on “Robert Falls’s beautiful, innovative staging,…Michael Philippi’s poetic lighting, and Richard Woodbury’s dynamic…score,” calling the production “a new standard of excellence for an ageless drama.” Brantley asserted that Brian Dennehy and Elizabeth Franz gave the “performances of their careers” in a “reimagined” production. Roma Torre wrote, “People will be talking about [Dennehy’s performance] for decades.” The production won a Tony Award for best revival of a play, and Dennehy and Franz, as well as director Robert Falls, earned Tony Awards; two other members of the cast, Kevin Anderson and Howard Witt, were also nominated for Tonys. In addition, Miller received the Antoinette Perry Special Lifetime Achievement Award. By its fiftieth anniversary, Salesman had sold about eleven million copies, making it the most successful modern play ever published (Lahr, “Making” 42).
Having firmly launched his career as a playwright in the 1940s, Miller wrote four plays during the 1950s: an adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, The Crucible, and two one-acts, A Memory of Two Mondays and A View from the Bridge, the latter of which he developed into a successful two-act play in 1956 for a London production directed by Peter Wood.
Miller was approached by Fredric March and Robert Lewis in 1950 to adapt Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (En folkefiende, first published in 1882) to overcome its previous stilted translations and make it more contemporary. The play opened on December 28, 1950, but ran for only thirty-six performances. In the era of McCarthyism, when Americans’ fear of the spread of communism was fanned, critics lambasted Miller for adding an ironic line about America, which was, in fact, in Ibsen’s original script (Bigsby, Company 80). A screenplay titled The Hook followed in 1951, but when Miller refused to change the characters to make them more politically palatable, the script was pulled; later, director Elia Kazan would collaborate with Miller on the making of the 1954 film On the Waterfront (Bigsby, Company 126).
Still, Miller refused to shy away from controversial issues, running instead into the lion’s mouth with the writing of The Crucible. Indeed, as he wrote the play, he did not know that he would be called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1956. Utilizing the Salem witch hunts and trials as a metaphor for the growing dangers of McCarthyism, Miller’s new play premiered January 22, 1953. Although its initial run was only 197 performances, The Crucible has since been the most frequently produced of Miller’s plays, both in the United States and abroad; along with Salesman, it is one of Miller’s two most studied and most popular plays. Miller blamed the initial reaction to the play in part on its staging, which the director, Jed Harris, had seen as a Dutch genre painting (Timebends 344). While critics recognized the power in, and implications of, Miller’s drama, most agreed that there was little effective emotion in the production.
Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune considered the play a “step backward” in Miller’s dramaturgy, while others concurred with Kerr’s view of the play’s traditional form and style and failed to accept the parallels Miller drew between the two historical periods in his effort to make universal assertions (Bigsby, File 30-35). However, the production won both the Tony Award and the Donaldson Award, and the play’s London production, mounted soon after, fared much better, perhaps because of Britain’s social and critical distance on the work’s subject matter. Despite its somewhat inauspicious beginnings, The Crucible has gone on to become the playwright’s most popular work, and Miller’s script for the 1996 film adaptation of the play earned him an Academy Award.
Miller wrote only two other plays in the 1950s, both of which were initially one-acts. A Memory of Two Mondays, a slice of life set in an automobile parts warehouse, and A View from the Bridge, a memory play about the protective jealousy of a longshoreman for his niece, which results in a tragic murder-suicide, premiered together on September 29, 1955, and ran for 149 performances. As Miller himself pointed out, one-act plays are a hard sell on Broadway; by the time audiences drive into New York and pay for dinner and parking, they want to sit for more than half an hour. Nevertheless, Miller wrote ten one-act plays that have been produced, two of which he later developed into full-length plays. For the two-act version of A View from the Bridge, which Miller called his “Greek drama,” he developed the two female leading roles, emphasized the neighborhood and its people, changed some of the one-act version’s poetic meter to prose, and intensified the triangular relationships (Otten 78). For the two-act’s production directed by Peter Brook in London, the set design “soared to the roof,” providing a fuller sense of Eddie’s environment (Miller, View viii).
After his critical success in the 1940s and early 1950s, Miller was absent from the theater until 1964. During the meantime, he wrote hundreds of pages for other plays but did not complete them. He also wrote the screenplay for the film The Misfits, in which his wife, Marilyn Monroe, was to star. Miller returned to the theater with After the Fall, produced by the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. Producer Robert Whitehead brought together Miller and director Elia Kazan, from whom Miller had been estranged since Kazan had named names before HUAC to save his directing career. The dynamics between the two must have been interesting both artistically and personally, given that one of the play’s characters, who is based on Kazan, names names, an action that results in another character’s suicide.
After the Fall opened at the American National Theater and Academy’s Washington Square Theatre, the temporary home for the new, twenty-six-actor theater company, on January 23, 1964, and ran for fifty-nine performances. Even before the play opened, protests began based on rumors that much of the work was based on Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe, an affront to those fans still mourning her death two years earlier. Ironically, however, throngs clamored for tickets, perhaps in part fueled by interest in the movie star. That Barbara Loden, the actress portraying Maggie, wore a blonde wig did little to separate Monroe from the character of Maggie. Although Miller insisted he was surprised at the public’s reaction, the play, along with Miller’s lengthy account and attempt to make sense of his failed marriage in Timebends, left him disinterested in discussing his second marriage further, despite incessant questions in interviews, at conferences, and at other appearances throughout the remainder of his life. Surprisingly, Miller’s final play, Finishing the Picture, which premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago on September 21, 2004, less than five months before his death, was first drafted in 1977-78 and centers on an emotionally fragile actress’s inability to complete the filming of a movie (Bigsby, Study 437).
As the Lincoln Center Repertory began, Elia Kazan stated, “We want the playwrights to think of our theater as a place where they can state their convictions clearly and without restriction, without a bow to any convention or stricture.” Miller reported that After the Fall consisted of a “new form, continuous stream of meaning…the way a mind would go in quest of a meaning” (“Ad-Libs” 69). Distilled from more than 5,000 pages, however, the play is 180 pages long and runs three and one-half hours (Norton). It includes several plotlines and themes, including the Great Depression, the Holocaust, marriage and divorce, and an actress’s drug- and alcohol-fueled demise. The critical and popular failures of After the Fall stemmed, in large part, from the play’s unfinished nature.
Critics were divided in their recognition and appreciation of Miller’s efforts. Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune found it to be a “thoroughly bad play: structurally inchoate, verbally-vague, psychologically imperceptive …[its] exhaustive self-revelation disingenuous, self-serving, and insensitive” and its staging “chopped up,” with mixed metaphors and abstract stage and realistic props. Yet, as John Chapman asserted, the play got “the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center off to an impressive start” (“After”). A writer for the Associated Press called it “a strange, stirring, and sensation-tinged experience; a beautiful, remarkable play.” Martin Gottfried wrote that “no single play in memory has produced so powerful an effect,” comparing it with Tea and Sympathy, Picnic, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (“After”).
Others noted the significance of the play not only in Miller’s oeuvre but also in American drama. Norman Nadel wrote in the New York World-Telegram and Sun that the play advanced drama as the works of August Strindberg and Eugene O’Neill had before it. Howard Taubman of The New York Times wrote that the play “may mark a turning point in the American drama” and that it was Miller’s most mature drama; he called Kazan’s direction “unfaltering in its perception and orchestration” and Loden’s performance “stunning.” In Taubman’s view, the company gave “every indication of becoming a true ensemble.” Commenting favorably on the staging, acting, music, and costumes, Caldwell Thomas of the Harvard Crimson stated, “Together they have enabled the American theatre to take a giant step.” Sheridan Morley noted years later that, while After the Fall is not Miller’s greatest play, it marked a turning point in his life. Harold Clurman asserted that had Miller “not written this play, he might never have been able to write another. We may now look to a future of ever more creative effort.” After the Fall was the first play to be published in the Saturday Evening Post, which also printed photographs from the original production (“Saturday”).
Twenty-six years later, the play received a significantly better critical reception in a revival staged by Michael Blakemore in London; the production starred a black actress, Josette Simon, as Maggie, and her performance was hailed as “smashing” (Allen), “magnificent” (Shaw), and “riveting” (Paton). Critics said that Simon provided “an exquisite portrayal” (Cairney) that “wholly eclipses the memory of Monroe” (Wardle).
Miller provided a second play for the new repertory company with Incident at Vichy, which was based on World War II interrogations. It opened December 3, 1964, and ran for ninety-nine performances. Miller’s only other play of the 1960s, The Price, his first commercial play since the two-act version of A View from the Bridge, proved to be a popular and critical hit. The play rose from the same drafts dating back to 1950 that After the Fall had, although the two plays are quintessentially different, both in content and in form. The Price is, arguably, one of Miller’s five best works, even though it is not as widely known as others such as Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, and A View from the Bridge. It reprises earlier preoccupations of Miller’s, including the Great Depression and supportive and prodigal sons, who here meet for the first time in twenty-eight years, sixteen years after their father’s death, to decide what to do with ten rooms of furniture he left behind.
The Price opened February 7, 1968, ran for 429 performances, and was nominated for the Tony Award for best play. Late in rehearsals, Miller had taken over the direction of the production from Ulu Grosbard (Greenfeld). Critics considered the play one of Miller’s best: Tony Lawrence asserted that it was “every bit as good as Salesman,” and Clive Barnes called it one of Miller’s two or three best plays and “one of the most engrossing and entertaining plays that Miller [had] ever written—superbly, flamboyantly theatrical.” Mike Stein stated that the play was “destined to become a classic.” In Miller’s New York Times obituary in 2005, The Price was listed as his last critical and commercial hit (Berger).
Miller wrote four plays in the 1970s, two of them one-acts: Fame and The Reason Why. These two plays, which were performed in New York’s Theatre Workshop in 1970, have not garnered much attention. Fame was later filmed in 1978 for television; The Reason Why was filmed in 1969. Miller’s next play, The Creation of the World and Other Business, was based on the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. Opening November 30, 1972, it ran for only twenty performances. Miller later adapted it for the musical stage under the title Up from Paradise, which was performed at the University of Michigan, opening April 23, 1974. The Archbishop’s Ceiling, which is based on Miller’s experience at a dinner party in Czechoslovakia in 1970 when he was president of International PEN (Bigsby, Companion 5), an organization that describes itself as an “association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship,” returns to his themes of paranoia and government infiltration. The play opened April 30, 1977.
Miller continued his playwriting despite many critics’ insistence that his greatest works were behind him. The most notable of the plays he produced during this next period was that based on Studs Terkel’s 1970 book of interviews about the Great Depression, Hard Times. Miller selected stories and characters from Terkel’s book to create The American Clock, placing memories of his own family center stage and returning thus to themes of sons and fathers, economic disaster, and the impacts on the individual of ineffectual social systems. First presented at the Spoleto Festival, The American Clock opened in New York on May 24, 1980; it lasted only twelve performances. Once more, Miller had taken over the direction of his play, this time from Dan Sullivan, as Miller believed that Sullivan did not understand the concept of the play. Labeled “a vaudeville,” The American Clock features an enormous cast and a large number of locations, requiring more scenic fluidity than any other of Miller’s plays.
Subsequent productions have continued to tackle this difficult play, with varying success. Peter Wood’s production at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1986 was reviewed by Clive Hirschhorn as follows: “Peter Wood’s lively direction does its best to balance the private and public aspects of a rather lopsided play, and he is aided in this difficult task by a large…[and] terrific [cast]” (“Striking”). The production was able to include many more songs of the period than the New York production had. In 1997, James Houghton’s production of Clock at his Signature Theatre Company in New York met with critical favor.
Miller next adapted a book by Fania Fénelon about an orchestra made up of women in a Nazi concentration camp who play music to stay alive. Playing for Time was first written for television in 1980 and earned four Emmy Awards the following year, including one for Miller’s script. Miller then adapted the work for the stage, and it opened on September 5, 1985. It remains a powerful, if lesser-known, play.
Miller followed this work with two sets of one-acts. In November 1982, under the title Two-Way Mirror, two one-acts, Some Kind of Love Story and Elegy for a Lady, opened. The two differ significantly in form and content: the first is based on an actual case of a falsely accused man, and the second is an abstract study of love, true devotion, and mutual understanding. In January 1987, under the title Danger: Memory!, another pair of one-acts, I Can’t Remember Anything and Clara, opened. The two are again of contrasting themes and forms. The first is a slice-of-life play about two elderly neighbors who attempt to come to terms with their aging and seeming purposelessness. Clara focuses on the denial and guilt of a father who knowingly allowed his daughter to date a former convict, only to find her murdered.
Miller continued to write plays in the 1990s, producing four that also varied in form and subject matter, reflecting his thematic and formal tendencies as well as his interest in continuing to experiment with form. A screenplay, Everybody Wins, was written in 1990, and Miller’s most unusual play of the decade, the satirical, surreal The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, followed a year after. Tired of the standard American theater, Miller chose to have Mt. Morgan’s world premiere directed by Michael Blakemore in London (“Miller’s Tale”). In both this production and the Williamstown one, which was directed by David Esbjornson and found its way to Broadway, the disparate themes center on a bigamist who is discovered by his two wives after he crashes his car on a mountain. The play requires constantly shifting locales as well as differentiation between the imagination of the bigamist, Lyman Felt, and the reality he must face. Critics respected the complexity of the play but were unsure what to make of it. The latter production earned a Tony Award nomination.
Two years later, Miller wrote The Last Yankee, first as a one-act and then as a full-length play; as in After the Fall, the two acts do not appear to mesh formally. Act 1 finds two men in the waiting room of a mental hospital ready to visit their wives; act 2 introduces the wives and offers a disturbing portrayal of the complexities of marriage.
Continuing with this theme, but returning to a more traditional structure, Miller wrote Broken Glass in 1994. This play is about the Holocaust and its effects as well as the blind innocence of those outside Nazi Germany. As with many of Miller’s earlier plays, to avoid the necessity of distracting and time-consuming scenery changes, the set was a modern metaphoric environment, complete with an onstage cellist; furniture for the various locales was readily rolled on and off the set.
Once again, critics varied in their responses. Writing of the production at the Royal National Theatre in London, Clive Hirschhorn stated that Broken Glass was Miller’s best play since The Price (“Broken”). Others also lauded the work, calling it “deeply compassionate” (Peter), “a heart-breaking piece of writing” (Darvell), a “compelling, full-blooded drama” (Stone), and “demanding and refreshing,” “one of [Miller’s] strongest plays for many years…a gripping and…powerfully affecting drama” (Spencer). Critics called Miller “as vital a writer as…ever” (Hagerty) and praised the “superb production,” “inspired, masterly direction,” and “completely brilliant performance by Henry Goodman” (White) as well as the “virtuous performance” of Margot Leicester (Shaw). One called it a “wise and profound play” that had received “the brilliant production it deserves” (Shaw). Others disagreed, calling the play “dramatically underpowered and burdened with an overly dramatic ending” (Johns), its writing “factitious” (Wolf), and Miller an “overrated playwright” (Macauley) writing about “too many issues.” Broken Glass won the Tony Award in New York and the Olivier Award in London. When director David Thacker took the production to Israel, it met with acute resonances among its audiences (Neill).
Miller’s final play of the twentieth century, Mr. Peters’ Connections, was produced in 1998 at the Signature Theatre Company; its British premiere followed at the Almeida Theatre in London. The play sounds like a swan song as a man reflects on the various people and relationships in his life. Both productions were well received by the critics, reflecting, perhaps, that they had finally changed their expectations of Miller and American drama.
As the new century broke, Miller, now in his eighties, managed to write three plays in the last four years of his life. Untitled was written in 2001 for the poet-playwright and president of the newly formed Czech Republic, Václav Havel. Resurrection Blues, written in 2002, concerns wealth, corruption, drugs, and a plan to televise a crucifixion. Miller’s final play, Finishing the Picture, was completed in 2004. He also wrote a piece for a London newspaper that he then published in 2001 as a book titled On Politics and the Art of Acting, which once again commented on the state of the American government and the country’s political leaders.
In addition to his stage plays, radio plays, and films, Miller wrote three collections of short stories—I Don’t Need You Any More (1967), Homely Girl, a Life, and Other Stories (1992), and Presence (2007)—three books with his wife, Ingeborg Morath, as photographer; three collections of essays; and a children’s book, Jane’s Blanket (1963). Miller’s autobiography, Timebends (1987), as well as collections of essays by the playwright—The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, edited by Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola (1978/1996); Echoes Down the Corridor, edited by Centola (2000); and The Crucible in History, and Other Essays (2000)—offer very useful perspectives from the writer himself.
Controversy about Miller’s plays continues, but many critics recognize Miller’s singular effect on the development of American drama in the twentieth century. Numerous books of criticism provide varying perspectives on Miller’s work over the past sixty years, and we are now, in effect, in the second and third generation of critics. Collections of critical essays by single authors include books by Harold Bloom, Neil Carson, Alice Griffin, Ronald Hayman, Sheila Huftel, Leonard Moss, Edward Murray, Benjamin Nelson, Terry Otten, and June Schlueter and James K. Flanagan. Collections of critical essays by multiple authors include volumes edited by Christopher Bigsby, Enoch Brater, Steven Centola, Robert W. Corrigan, Robert Martin, and James J. Martine. Collections of essays on Death of a Salesman include those edited by Harold Bloom, Brenda Murphy, Stephen A. Marino, and Gerald Weales. Collections of essays on The Crucible include those edited by John H. Ferres, James Martine, and Gerald Weales; in addition, Bernard F. Dukore has published a volume that addresses both Salesman and The Crucible. Also quite useful are Bigsby’s Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, published in 2005, and his File on Miller, published in 1987. Two books of interviews are Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), edited by Matthew Roudané, and Bigsby’s Arthur Miller and Company (1990).
Only three biographies of Miller exist to date: Martin Gottfried’s Arthur Miller: His Life and Work (2003), Enoch Brater’s Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Work (2005), and the first volume of Christopher Bigsby’s Arthur Miller: 1915-1962 (2008), which analyzes Miller’s life to 1962 (the next volume is slated for publication in the near future). Finally, interested students may find more information about Miller and his works by accessing the Web sites of the Arthur Miller Society (http://www.ibiblio.org/miller) and The Arthur Miller Journal (http://www.stfranciscollege.edu/academics/publications/miller).
Those who have doubted the universality and endurance of Miller’s drama are quickly having their opinions changed as new productions and the publication of new editions and criticism continue the analysis and discussion of his work. Still, perceptions of Miller and his work remain divergent across national boundaries. Miller once noted that plays other than Death of a Salesman are often hailed outside the United States as his finest work, and British scholar Christopher Bigsby pointed out in 1990 that in Britain the playwright is “treated as a living writer who continues to write plays that address our culture. In America, he’s still thought of as a realist who wrote great plays many years ago” (quoted in Goldfarb). Yet, both within and outside the United States, Miller’s insistence on voicing his political views has meant that his plays have often been banned.
While All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, The Price, and Broken Glass are still considered Miller’s best plays, After the Fall, The Archbishop’s Ceiling, The American Clock, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, and Mr. Peters’ Connections deserve further critical attention devoted to exploring their production possibilities and analyzing more accurately Miller’s dramaturgy, developing themes, and place in American drama. It will also be of interest to see which, if any, further works Miller’s estate chooses to publish and what light these might shed on Miller’s concerns, his writing process, and the development of his art.