Arthur Miller's Global Theater

Cross-Cultural Encounters: Arthur Miller and the International Theater Community

3 Enoch Brater Cross-Cultural Encounters Arthur Miller and the International Theater Community WhenArthur Miller died at his Connecticut home on February 10,2005, surrounded by close members of his family, the report of his passing was treated in the national media as a major event. America’s most enduring playwright was eighty-nine years old. No one could remember when an obituary of a leading cultural figure had appeared above the fold on the front page of the NewYork Times before. This certainly was not the case for Susan Sontag, who predeceased him by several weeks, or even for Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist who died, the same age as Miller, only two months later. A similar sense of urgency was also apparent when the public memorial held in his honor took place at the Majestic Theatre in NewYork the following May. The long line for admission crept down West 44th Street, swung around Schubert Alley, and continued ontoWest 45th Street. More than fifteen hundred people attended the service, but not everyone was able to get in. Miller was,of course,the quintessential NewYorker,both by outlook and accent, so it should come as no surprise that his local community would want to pay tribute to its native son in such a conspicuous and meaningful way. And yet it was not only Manhattan that recognized, as Linda Loman does in Death of a Salesman, that “attention, attention must finally be paid to such a man.” All over the country Miller was celebrated as the last of the twentieth century’s theatrical giants, the playwright who, along with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, had given a new voice to a modern drama that was distinctly—and tragically—American. That steadfast Americanism, especially as discussed by fellow playwrights Edward Albee and Tony Kushner and longtime friends like the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, Jr.,and former presidential candidate George McGovern (all of whom spoke at Miller’s New York memorial), seems to loom even larger today than it did during his own lifetime. So much so that a close look at the more than fifty-six plays Miller completed 4 Arthur Miller’sGlobalTheater now reveals a landscape as vast as Whitman’s, a moral center as lucid as Emerson’s,and a lyricism as surprisingly eloquent as anything one might find in Hart Crane’s epic poem about that mythic gateway known as Brooklyn Bridge. All of this from a writer who liked to say, as he did of All My Sons, that what he really wanted to do all along was compose a story “so that you could tell it to a man seated next to you on a train, and he would understand it.”1 Written“from the sidewalk,not the skyscraper,”the“brutally realistic” work Miller wrote about war profiteering defined the big subject that would make him famous:the conflict between public and private morality. All My Sons, a drama about “business vs. civilization,”2 was not so much a play about what was wrong with America as it was about what still needed to be set right in its functioning democracy. He placed his audience in the hot seat.“It’s not your guilt I want,” he has his character Leduc say to the count in Incident atVichy, a much later play, “it’s your responsibility.” In 1947, when Elia Kazan’s production of All My Sons opened on Broadway, the nation, having defeated the Nazis in Europe and Japanese imperialism in the Pacific,was feeling pretty good about itself. At a high point of such triumphalism, the playwright dared to ask questions no one wanted to think about at that or any other time: Who made money out of the death of whose sons? And who stood by and watched it happen? In this play, as so often in Miller, “the chickens come home to roost”: Joe Keller, the manufacturer who sold defective airplane parts to the military, must pay the ultimate price for reneging on his part of the social contract. But before he leaves this stage he must be made to realize what his surviving son already knows: all those young pilots who flew off on missions from which they never returned were“all my sons.” His final statement,straightforward though it is, nonetheless certifies the power and eloquence Miller extracts from a deceptively simple recognition scene: “And I guess they were, I guess they were.” Moments later a shot is...