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

The Late Plays of Arthur Miller

Robert Scanlan The Late Plays of Arthur Miller Since he turned seventy in 1985, Arthur Miller has finished nine new plays (IThink aboutYou a Great Deal, I Can’t Remember Anything, Clara,The Ride Down Mt. Morgan,The LastYankee, Broken Glass, Mr. Peters’ Connections , Resurrection Blues and Finishing the Picture); he has extensively revised two big plays of the seventies (The Archbishop’s Ceiling and The American Clock), published a magisterial 614-page autobiography (Timebends), written two screenplays that have been made into completed films (Everybody Wins,The Crucible) and seen his novel Focus made into a movie,1 collaborated on a new opera based on A View from the Bridge, and published a novella (Homely Girl). In addition, during this same period, Miller has participated in important revivals of the “Big Four” canonical plays (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman,The Crucible,A View from the Bridge)—each of which has triggered a new round of major awards—and he has seen several of his plays, old and new, made into television movies. His lifetime total of plays,by my count,now stands at thirty-six (ten of which are oneacts ). In these same years (which most ordinary people would call their old age) Miller has kept up his usual steady stream of articles and essays— a practice that has been a regular and distinguished feature of his entire writing career.A new collection of these occasional pieces was published on his eighty-fifth birthday (Echoes Down the Corridor). In short, Arthur Miller, even in his old age, has been the hardest-working and most productive playwright in America: he simply has no rivals. The plays of this period have been given a mixed press.The British, by and large, have been the ones to hail them as the visionary works of a master, while the American press has been grudging and whiny about them, habitually dismissing Miller as a relic of a bygone era. No wonder that Miller has grown fond of premiering his work in London, where he is spared the airy disdain of young and undistinguished theater critics, or the lingering hostility of old established ones. Miller has paid a heavy price in America for his 1963–64 “Lincoln Center plays”—After the Fall 180 and Incident at Vichy, which were both abused by critics in their day, but have fared much better than predicted over time—again, especially in Great Britain.Since then,run-of-the-mill critics have thought it safe and fashionable to glance condescendingly over their shoulders at what Miller might be up to, but to dismiss almost a priori the continuing new work (The Price,The Creation of theWorld and Other Business,The American Clock, The Archbishop’s Ceiling). These important middle plays deserve careful critical reconsideration (and fresh and probing productions), but I will confine myself on this occasion to defending six of the latest nine—all written since Miller turned seventy. It is almost as if Miller’s huge success with the Big Four, written in the years between 1947 and 1956 (basically, Miller’s thirties) is being held against him. Is it fair to compare his current work continually to his achievements of that era? What other American playwright could stand up to such comparison? It is especially ironic in Miller’s case because there is no standard by which to make the comparison, except his own success. And what we conveniently summarize as success is in itself a complex sociohistorical dynamic that is only tenuously related to the intrinsic merits of individually wrought plays.The LastYankee, for instance, could be said to be a better-crafted play than the rickety All My Sons; Broken Glass could easily be praised as more painfully disturbing and emotionally complex than Death of a Salesman;The Ride Down Mt. Morgan might arguably have far more social and psychosexual significance than does (or did) the melodramatic View from the Bridge; and how feeble would A Memory of Two Mondays appear in a matchup with Mr. Peters’ Connections? Such comparisons—tinged as each might be with more than a hint of validity—are just as absurd as the ones that disparage the later work as “not up to” the earlier.The real question is who has written (or was capable of writing) a better play in this same span of time. American playwriting since 1985 is not a field full of obvious strong rivals to Miller’s plays of the...