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Toby Zinman “Vaudeville at the Edge of the Cliff” From the beginning, Arthur Miller has been writing memory plays; his interest has always been in how the weight of the past shapes the present. The past, for Miller, is not merely the events that alter subsequent events—the easy causality of chronology—but the way his characters remember , how they interpret those past events: memory, with its entourage of regret and nostalgia and denial, and with its vivid and inevitable social context, is his great subject.And how to stage memory has been Miller’s theatrical task from Death of a Salesman to After the Fall to The Ride Down Mt. Morgan and Mr. Peters’ Connections.The “subject” continues in Resurrection Blues and Finishing the Picture. But there has been a significant shift in the way memory is made manifest on stage in his later plays.As the past inevitably gets both longer and further away,the moral certainty of the preacher,the engagé stridency that some feel mars Miller’s earlier work, has given way to an acknowledgment of the human mystery, the muddle memory makes of the illogic of life. It strikes me that Miller has finally discovered the Absurd. Miller strugged with The American Clock for more than a decade,1 a play very much about his oldest themes: the betrayal of the American public by the American dream,the relation between a society and a family . It was not until 1986, during the British National Theatre’s production , that he found the solution: “The secret was vaudeville” (xv). As a theatrical mode, it suggests everything that might be useful to Miller: nonelitist entertainment, delivered in fragments, with wild mood shifts between melodrama and farce.That vaudeville is no longer a living theatrical form furthers the usefulness, in that it creates the crucial aura of the long-gone. Miller has enlisted this form and this spirit not only to re-express his vision, but to re-create it. In so many of the later plays, including The American Clock,The LastYankee, I Can’t Remember Anything, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan and Mr. Peters’ Connections, there is vaudevillian “business”—singing, dancing, pratfalls, sexy burlesque, piano play164 ing—and all of it with the Beckettian tone of“laughing wild amid severest woe.” It is memory—what you remember, what you can’t remember, what you won’t remember—that finally strikes Miller as the hilarious, terrible joke of mortality. In I Can’t Remember Anything, one of the two plays of Danger: Memory ! two old friends have this disagreement about reading newspapers: Leo: Well, I like to know what’s happening. Leonora: But nothing is “happening”! Excepting that it keeps getting worse and more brutal and more vile. . . . Leo: What the hell are you getting so angry about if I read a newspaper? . . . Listen, I’m depressed too . . . Leonora: No, you are not depressed, you just try to sound depressed. But in the back of your mind you are still secretly expecting heaven-knowswhat incredible improvement over the horizon. . . .This country is being ruined by greed and mendacity and narrow-minded ignorance, and you go right on thinking there is hope somewhere.And yet you really don’t, do you?—but you refuse to admit that you have lost your hope.That’s exactly right, yes—it’s this goddamned hopefulness when there is no hope—that is why you are so frustrating to sit with!2 Given the similarity of their names, Leo and Leonora may well be two sides of the same person, making it likely that we are listening to Miller arguing with himself.This philosophic debate is fundamental to the deep change in Miller’s drama. Eros and Thanatos: the catastrophic vaudeville act. In the battle Freud defined in The Ego and the Id3 between the force of life manifested in the sexual impulse, and the force of death, Miller has always been on the side of Eros; but in the early and middle plays, life is worth living only if it is lived with moral conviction. But, as he has shown us in play after play, such living is difficult and painful and full of sacrifices most people are not willing to make. As Mt. Morgan’s protagonist, Lyman Felt, says, “Maybe it’s simply that if you try to live according to your real desires, you have to end up looking like a shit” (31).4 As he...

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