The following article was originally published in The Denver Post on Feb. 21, 2005:
“The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.” Arthur Miller, discussing ‘The Crucible’
At the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
playwright Arthur Miller was asked to comment on the chaos swirling
outside. There were 12,000 police officers battling anti-war
demonstrators in the first live, national telecast of social unrest
on American soil.
“They hate the young,” Miller said simply.
“That has always stuck with me as a wonderful, terse pronouncement of what was happening to America at that time,” said Germinal Stage Denver artistic director Ed Baierlein.
Miller, equally known for writing “Salesman” and marrying Marilyn Monroe, died of heart failure late Thursday at age 89 at his Connecticut home.
He is not being mourned as America’s greatest playwright – scholars argue for Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams in that debate. But Miller, a consensus third, will be remembered as the moralist of the past century, even though his sense of moralism stood in direct opposition to widely accepted American social mores.
Miller’s death leaves Edward Albee as perhaps America’s greatest living playwright. Albee (“The Goat”) said Miller paid him a great compliment last year. “He said my plays were necessary,” Albee said. “I will go one step further and say Arthur’s plays are essential. He and I marched together several times to protest repressive governments. His work teaches us a lot about how to fight evil.”
Miller, who found drama in realistic and brutally honest dialogue, elevated the significance of ordinary people by transporting their hopes and anguish to the stage. As Willy’s wife Linda says famously in “Death of a Saleman,” “Attention must finally be paid to such a person.”
Broadway marquees dimmed their lights Friday at curtain time in tribute, ironic in light of Miller attitude toward the work shown there recently: “We never did have, at least on Broadway, a whole lot of acerbic social commentary, but there was sometimes a steady trickle, which seems now to have dried up,” Miller wrote in a short 2003 essay in The New York Times.
Miller’s passing might be described as “the death of the death of the American Dream.” And Miller would be the first to say it was a dream that needed dying. The American Dream Miller’s characters consistently failed to attain was a flawed dream that grew out of the desperation of the Depression and was mired in capitalism and greed.
“Miller was certainly the conscience for the postwar generation as far as the aspirations of people who had the wrong priorities,” said Baierlein.
His greatest concerns, wrote Charles Isherwood for The New York Times, “were with the moral corruption brought on by bending one’s ideals to society’s dictates; by buying into the values of a group when they conflict with the voice of personal conscience. To sell out your brother is to sell out yourself, Miller firmly believed.”
Miller’s first principal work was “All My Sons” (1947), which established his lifelong interest in father-son relationships. The next year, at only 33, he changed the face of the American theater with the Pulitzer-winning “Death of a Salesman.”
Miller described Willy as an everyman “who finds he must create another personality in order to make his own way in the world, and therefore has sold himself.”
Miller saw salesmanship itself as the ultimate fraud – the ability to sell a commodity regardless of its intrinsic usefulness. Willy was driven by the example of tycoons such as B.F. Goodrich, but he was the ultimate contradiction, for he was at the diminished and wrong end of capitalism’s spectrum. Willy was tragic because he bought into the dream. And if you do, Willy finally admits, “You end up more dead than alive.”
Christopher Leo, who directed a recent local production of a Miller play, said so many of his characters fail because they are not pursuing an honest dream.
“They are trying to achieve an American dream that has been defined by those around them,” said Leo, who helmed “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” at the John Hand Theatre in October.
“The tragedy of Willy Loman was that if he had just looked closer to home, he would have seen two sons who adored him and a wife who doted on him. He already had realized a much more important dream. Instead, he was concerned with his pocketbook, and he determined his life was meaningless,” Leo said.
Miller created another sensation in 1953 with “The Crucible,” set during the Salem Witch Trials as an overt commentary on McCarthyism. Miller had been ordered to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in his play, a flawed man must choose between his survival and his good name.
“For me to get interested enough to write a play, it has to have immense moral significance,” Miller said in 1996. “But nobody buys tickets to see morals. They buy them to see human beings. I hope that’s what they see attending one of my plays: the face of humanity.”
In 1956, Miller married Monroe, which brought him as much fame as his plays. They divorced five years later. In a 1992 interview with a French newspaper, he called Monroe “highly self-destructive” and said that during their marriage, “all my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much success.”
Miller remained a prolific writer to the end. In his last short story (“Beavers,” in the current Harper’s), a man comes to reflect on his life as he contemplates killing a beaver on his property. “He had not believed in his death,” Miller wrote. “He was young and immortal to himself.”
Director Leo said, “Mount Morgan” (1999) proved Miller’s sharp social commentary was acute to the end. An unapologetic bigamist who maintained two families was a statement on the 1980s Reagan-era “Me Generation.”
“Even in his dotage, Miller was concerned with compassion,” Leo said.
In later life, Miller’s critical eye toward the U.S. made his popularity grow in London as it waned here. A West End revival of “Death of a Salesman” opens in April.
“They didn’t like him much in the U.S. because he was too outspoken and too critical of the way of life there,” said British playwright and contemporary Harold Pinter.
Miller was born Oct. 17, 1915, in New York. He was married three times: to Mary Grace Slattery, to Monroe and to Inge Morath. He married Morath in 1962; they were together until her death in 2002. He is survived by three children: Jane Ellen and Robert, with Slattery; and filmmaker Rebecca Miller, with Morath. Rebecca is married to actor Daniel Day Lewis, who starred in “The Crucible” film.
Denver Post wire services contributed to this report.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
His works and his words
Arthur Miller’s plays and the first years they were produced:
“Honors at Dawn,” 1936
“No Villain: They Too Arise,” 1937
“The Man Who Had All the Luck,” 1944
“All My Sons,” 1947
“Death of a Salesman,” 1949
“The Crucible,” 1953
“A View from the Bridge,” 1955
“A Memory of Two Mondays,” 1955
“After the Fall,” 1964
“Incident at Vichy,” 1965
“The Price,” 1969
“The Creation of the World and Other Business,” 1972
“Up From Paradise,” 1974
“The Archbishop’s Ceiling,” 1976
“The American Clock,” 1980
“Elegy for a Lady” (and) “Some Kind of Love Story,” produced together under the title “Two-Way Mirror,” 1983
“Playing for Time,” 1986
“The Golden Years,” 1990
“The Last Yankee,” 1991
“The Ride Down Mount Morgan,” 1991
“Broken Glass,” 1994
“Mr. Peters’ Connections,” 1998
“Resurrection Blues,” 2002
“Finishing the Picture,” 2004
From “Death of a Salesman”
“I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”
