Arthur Miller on Plays and Playwriting

Arthur Miller on Plays and Playwriting ROBERT A. MARTIN and RICHARD D. MEYER • THE FOLLOWING conversation took place at The University of Michigan in the late spring of 1974 between rehearsals for the premiere production of Arthur Miller's latest work, Up From Paradise. As Guest-Artist-inResidence with the University's Professional Theatre Program, Miller agreed to meet with a class in American Drama that was engaged in a study of the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. The scene: a classroom; the cast: students and faculty members of The University of Michigan. In the classroom, Miller is relaxed and informal. When he says he prefers a question-answer format, twenty hands immediately shoot up. Miller points to a woman student in the front row. QUESTION: In A View From The Bridge, why did you start with a narrator? As I read it, he could just as well have been a minor character. MILLER: Well, it helps to put the play at a certain distance -like a tale. It struck me when I was writing the play that it was somehow reminiscent of something extremely ancient. It's a vendetta story, which is the basis of so much Greek drama. They are people who have a blood debt that they have to pay. That story came from a true story - I was partially a witness to it - and it struck me then that somehow something was being re-enacted; that I was telling a very old story as well as a contemporary one. I suppose it was like in painting sometimes, when a certain kind of painting will try to distance the center so that the eye has to search back for it. It's purely an aesthetic feeling. Alfieri - the narrator - is a minor character, except that he is very crucial to that play. He's a kind of chorus in that he represents common sense in the way that Greek choruses did. That is, common sense in relation to ex375 376 ROBERT A. MARTIN AND RICHARD D. MEYER cess. Disaster comes from excess, and he is trying to keep Eddie Carbone in the middle of the road and not let his truth - that is to say, his real nature - come out. Because once the real nature comes out you're dead, and that's what his function is. QUESTION: In The Crucible, I'm interested in John Proctor's motivation for sacrificing himself. Is it something idealistic like honor or is it something more practical like his pride.? MILLER: It's his pride, yes, and a mixed ~ense of unworthiness, which is, I suppose; a very Christian idea. Literally, life wouldn't be worth living if he walked out of there having been instrumental in condemning people who, by this time, he believes are much better than he is. However, this doesn't have to be a New England situation. It just happens that I'm presently reading a biography of Joseph Stalin. A lot of people were killed by him in the thirties. It wasn't infrequent that somebody cooperated with the Secret Police in condemning their friends whom they knew to be perfectly innocent of anything. As repayment for their services, they were given some extra favor. Then they shot themselves after they had gotten what they had bargained for. QUESTION: Shouldn't a person sacrifice his ideals if it will help humanity? What good does it do to die a martyr? MILLER: Well, it depends from whose point of view you're looking at it. The Salem witchcraft trials would have been stopped anyway; these things can't go on forever. But this one looked like it was going to go on a long time. It was a tiny population of whom about twenty people were hanged for no real reason. The thing that stopped it, finally, was when Rebecca Nurse, who was known in the community as a particularly devout woman, was about to be hanged. Instead of begging forgiveness for her sins, she was on the gallows with a crowd of people watching and she cried out to them, "I am as innocent as the day I was born." Because...