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

The American Clock: “Epic Vaudeville”

Peter W. Ferran The American Clock “EpicVaudeville” There is nothing quite like The American Clock among Arthur Miller’s plays. Some of the earlier ones approach its presentational directness, others share its documentary impulse, a few make some use of music; but no other Miller play exploits all these features to make such a distinctive theatrical definition. And all the plays that follow are theatrically illuminated by it, to a markedly greater degree than by anything preceding this remarkable work.The reason has to do with the author’s formal intentions. In a 1980 interview soon after the play’s mounting at the Spoleto Festival ,Miller told StudsTerkel:“I have experimented with formal problems since the time I started writing.There’s an attempt here to do two things at the same time, which is the nature of a mural. . . .When you look close at any face, it may turn out to be a real person’s.When you step away, you see a whole pattern, the grand movement. It’s fundamentally a picture of many people interacting with each other and with the heavens. . . .That’s the form I’m trying to create: a picture of people interacting with each other and with a significant historical event, the Depression.”1 This formal aim, nascent in the Charleston tryout but thwarted in the Broadway premiere later in 1980, was only realized by Britain’s National Theatre in 1986; under Peter Wood’s direction, Miller’s original wielding of two dramaturgical elements—narration and vaudeville—finally received appropriate theatrical expression.This landmark production finally stamped the play’s generic character as“epic,”the term Miller pointedly uses in his introduction to the published final version of the text.2 Underpinning these performance components is a correspondingly “epic” substance—story and thought—which is drawn both from Miller’s personal experience of the Great Depression and from Studs Terkel’s oral history, HardTimes.3 The formal “epic” elements of The American Clock challenge its producing theater artists to create a particular playhouse experience for audiences .To appreciate this challenge theoretically, we have to entertain 153 questions about what happens in a theater when the play is performed— affective questions such as these: How does the audience respond to actors who serve intermittently as narrators of the action they are also performing ? How does an episodic structure of some thirty scenes, and the resultant performance rhythm, affect the audience’s reception of the ideas informing the various experiences being dramatized? How is this rhythm and its cumulative effect defined by a design scheme that calls for eleven lighting “fadeouts” and an abstract-theatricalist scenic decor? What is the possible range of feeling incited by juxtaposing such disparate scenes as—for example—a routine by a comedy team, a twentiesstyle melodramatic scene in a speakeasy, and a Black jazz vocalist’s performance of a tune identified with Billie Holiday? Actors, directors and scenic designers must also manage the practical demands arising from the two formal features of the play that stamp it as uniquely unconventional among Miller’s works: narration and vaudeville .The artists have to discover how each instance of narration differs from the others, as well as how each suits its individually developing character. A crucial question is how to define the relationship with the audience that an act of direct address always assumes.These concerns determine the fundamental task for actor and director, which is to find the actor’s intention or objective for every instance of addressing the audience .A glance at the play’s text shows how variable this is. Obviously, no single objective will govern all instances of the play’s narrative activity; the whole dramatic context must be considered. From it emerge two telling facts: first, there are several narrating characters, all having different interpretive “objectives”; second, the play is labeled “AVaudeville.” The Narrators The first words of the play are spoken, in turn, by Rose, Lee, Moe and the company.They use the past tense. Rose: By the summer of 1929 . . . Lee: I think it’s fair to say that nearly every American . . . Moe: Firmly believed that he was going to get . . . Company: Richer and richer . . . Moe: Every year. Then Robertson:“The country knelt to a golden calf in a blanket of red, white, and blue.” Arthur Miller’s America 154 Arthur Robertson is the most prominent of the...