Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change (review)

From the notes on the contributors to this volume, the writers seem an unlikely group to compose a volume of essays on Arthur Miller. Collectively, they have an impressive list of publications, including several books on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee, as well as books on Tom Stoppard, David Rabe, John Osborne, Terrence McNally, Henry James, Postmodernism, the Black Arts Movement, and scene design. What is surprisingly absent is critical work on Arthur Miller. The only work on Miller that is listed in the contributors' notes is The Stages of Arthur Miller by the editor, Enoch Brater. Of course, New York Times critic Mel Gussow, who wrote the afterword, has written extensively on Miller; actor Patrick Stewart, interviewed here, originated the role of Lyman Felt in New York; composer William Bolcom, also interviewed, collaborated with Miller; contributor Laurence Goldstein has written on Miller and worked extensively with publications by and about Miller in the Michigan Quarterly Review. But what the notes show is that Arthur Miller has not been a major focus in the work of most of the contributors.

Why, then, this particular volume of essays? The mystery is cleared up in the preface, in which Enoch Brater explains that the essays are based on the papers given at a symposium at the University of Michigan in 2000 in honor of Miller's eighty-fifth birthday. The volume is essentially the conference proceedings from the symposium, the papers "rethought and retooled in light of what took place during the conference" (vii). Brater does not explain the rationale for the choice of participants, but presumably, bringing together this eclectic mix of scholars, critics, and theatre professionals was intended to subject Miller's work to fresh scrutiny from a variety of points of view, which this volume certainly does. As is true of any volume of conference proceedings, the essays are not uniform in quality or usefulness to the student or scholar of Miller, and because many of the writers are relatively new to the study of Miller, there is some re-treading of old ground, but there is a good deal of information and insight here that is worth attending to.

Although Brater does not mention it as a conscious design, one thing that distinguishes this volume from similar collections of essays on Arthur Miller is its emphasis on performance as opposed to literary analysis. One of the most interesting items in the volume is the interview with William Bolcom, in which he describes his work with Miller and Arnold Weinstein in turning A View from the Bridge into an opera. Peter Ferran offers a director's view of The American Clock, which he directed at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2000. Arnold Aronson contributes an interesting essay on the symbolic element in Miller's scenic conception, and Ruby Cohn describes three productions that "manipulated" Miller's plays, including Miller's own production of Death of Salesman in Beijing and the Wooster Group's LSD. Frank Gagliano's essay about his plan for turning Miller's autobiography Timebends into a play illuminates the intensely dramatic quality of Miller's imagination even when he was writing prose, but it ends somewhat confusingly with a letter from Miller telling Gagliano that Miller does not want the autobiography made into a play: "I would rather the thing remain a piece of prose than picked apart and acted out. I am afraid I can't see an esthetic purpose in it," wrote Miller (22).

The volume also includes two essays about using Miller in the classroom, one by Bruce J. Mann, who writes about his use of the idea of the "unseen presence" or "inescapable force" hovering over Miller's plays to help students understand them and the plays of other playwrights, and one by Elinor Fuchs, who writes about her students' use of Death of a Salesman...