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Frank Gagliano The Timebends World Prospect for Performance I am a playwright. And, from the very first time I read Timebends, I thought it would make a wonderful theater piece. I’ll briefly try to lay out how I’ve been wrestling with the elements in the book—to find some shape that, at the least, could be performed on the stage of my mind’s eye; and, at the most, could actually be produced for a live audience.After all, what better way to honor this country ’s greatest living playwright than to make a play of his life; especially since such a theatrical blueprint as Timebends exists to help construct such a piece. From the start I felt that the collage form of the book—with its fragmenting of time—was perfect for an epic theater presentation.Timebends details, and at times dramatizes, a particular life against a sweep of American and world history, and seems to me to render a central character’s odyssey to overcome external and internal obstacles, in his search for connections; and in his resistance to, and need to transcend, despair. It also deals with a subject that increasingly intrigues me: the making and sustaining of an artist in an increasingly corrupt, corporate-influenced, American commercial theater. Among the characters included—and I imagine a dozen or so actors playing all of them—are Brooks Atkinson, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, Molly Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Lee Strasberg, Paula Strasberg, Lillian Hellman , Saul Bellow, Harry Cohn, Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer, OrsonWelles,Alexander Calder, Harold Clurman, Spyros Skouras, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Laurence Olivier, Kermit Bloomgarden, Brendan Behan, Peter Brook, Robert Whitehead, Tennessee Williams, Mordecai Gorelik, Bobby Lewis, John Huston, Robert Lowell, Sidney Lumet, Marcello Mastroianni, Maya Plisetskaya, Dimitri Shostakovich, Louis Untermeyer, Kurt Weill, Ernie Pyle. Some of the characters on this list I got to know a bit, later on in my 17 career; most I didn’t. But I certainly knew of them; and in Timebends they appear in scenes and have dialogue and take part in back-story events that reveal much about Arthur Miller, the times he lived in, and his plays. In addition, some of these scenes have pressured beginnings, journeys, and consequences,often in one dramatic arc,and just need to be dropped into the stage epic—almost without editing. I’m thinking, for example, of the scene where Miller and his All My Sons–Death of a Salesman director, Elia Kazan, are attempting to get the famous and notorious head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, to back Miller’s waterfront rackets screenplay,The Hook.1 It is at once a scene that involves a larger-than-life character of authority, a scene of large wants and obstacles—and all of it mired in the oppressive politics of the day. The event journeys to the following consequence: Miller withdraws the screenplay in the face of political censorship and pressure from Cohn. In addition, it’s the first scene where Marilyn Monroe appears; standing on the periphery (she’ll be a major character later on), but dramatically active in the scene because Miller keeps viewing her out of the corner of his eye and because she has to endure Harry Cohn’s leering and boorish behavior. And I’m thinking of the great and terrible and sad scene (332–35) when Elia Kazan (whom Miller loved as a brother) tells Miller that he’s going to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee; and Miller comes to the horrible discovery that had he been part of Kazan’s earlier life,when Kazan had dabbled in American Communism— brother-like or not—Kazan would have handed Miller over to the committee .By the way,this same scene appears in Kazan’s memoir,A Life, and the outline of the event is identical; with Kazan, in his book, feeling that what he did was right; but Kazan, to his credit, is also saddened by the breakup. Miller, at that point, was on his way to Salem to do research for The Crucible; and there is a final moment in the scene when Kazan’s wife, Molly, realizes that Miller is equating what her husband is doing with the witch hunt madness of Salem. It is a horrific moment of dramatic discovery for a character, and one can see and hear the earth opening for Molly, as it had for Miller throughout the confrontation. There are many great...

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