Writing during a century that ushered in (most notably in Bertolt Brecht’s vision for “epic theatre”) a conception of drama that was not simply sensitive to and reflective of the ideological struggles of the early to mid-twentieth century but determined to enact radical change in and through the audience, Arthur Miller was a socially engaged, politically attuned playwright committed to his craft as a “serious business,” one “that places serious issues before the public.”1 Inspired by Henrik Ibsen, his “avowed master” according to David Bronsen (229), Miller used the stage to work through his own ideological and even existential differences with contemporary American society.2 Speaking with Steven R. Centola in 1982, Miller explicated a belief implicit in each of his works that “Society makes such a heavy demand upon the individual that he has to give up his individuality” (346). Society, as Bronsen remarks, is for Miller and his characters “the great antagonist against which the individual must rebel” (241). Indeed, Miller’s own life was touched, or more accurately brutalized, by financial hardship after the collapse of his father’s textile business during the Great Depression, an economic catastrophe alleviated only by the onset of World War II and the global market it created for American military machinery (the subject of All My Sons). Industrial society for Miller was almost definitionally unconducive to individuality both in general terms and particularly to the “average man,” as he argues in “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949: see Miller 1994).
In this chapter, I explore the profound and unresolvable antagonism that Miller strives to understand and articulate between human beings and their changing environment, suggesting that in Miller’s works we see a nascent proto-posthumanism. Miller is interested in the collision of humankind with (literal and figurative) machinery, with the manner in which early- to mid-twentieth-century modernization and its reciprocal mechanization of both domestic and work space dramatically altered the nature of being human and the relationship between human beings and their denaturalized cybernetic ecosystems. More specifically, I want to tease out Miller’s subtle but peculiarly recurrent fascination with broken engines, as both a material reality and a deeply resonant and diversely valent metaphor for a spectrum of dis- and malfunctioning biological, familial, psychological, political, and social systems. That Miller lived in a period of American history that saw itself on the cusp of mass automation was remarked upon by his contemporary, Robert W. Corrigan, who draws an analogy between the swiftness of life and Miller’s rise to fame as a young playwright, commenting that “We live in an instant age. Everything from the most complex information to giant buildings, from vast networks of electric circuitry to blenderized gourmet meals, can be produced or made available in a flash. It should be of little wonder, then, that we also tend to create instant major figures in the arts” (141). Corrigan lights here upon precisely those concerns that pervade Miller’s writing, and it is these that explain Miller’s continued resonance for the post-industrial information era.
Almost alone among the arts the theater has managed to live despite the devouring mechanization of the age, and, in some places and instances, even to thrive and grow. Under these circumstances of a very long if frequently interrupted history, one may make the assumption that the drama and its production must represent a well-defined expression of profound social needs, needs which transcend any particular form of society or any particular historic moment. (3)
In a somewhat polemic panegyric that risks underplaying the fact that, as Jean-Paul Sartre remarked in 1961, “[t]he bourgeoisie has been in control of the theatre for about 150 years,”3 Miller suggests that drama is uniquely placed, as an art form, not simply to represent socio-historically specific issues, but to express something transcendent about the human condition (Sartre 1961, 3). Perhaps this is because theater, performance, in the immediacy of its relationship with and access to its audience, retains something of the power (of presence/proximity) lost in the (absent/distant) printed word.
To summarize Miller’s views, a social play, in contrast to a non-social or a psychological play, demonstrates the impact of social forces—the class structure, the economy, the system of norms and values, family patterns, etc.—on the raw psychology and lives of the characters […] and, finally, addresses itself to the question, as did classical Greek drama which Miller regards as the forerunner of all social plays, “how are we to live?” in a social and humanistic sense. (292–93)
Pessimistically, in Miller’s plays the answer may be that we are not to live at all, given the prevalence of suicide: consider Larry and subsequently Joe in All My Sons, Willy in Death of a Salesman, Gus in A Memory of Two Mondays, and David Beeves in The Man Who Had All the Luck who, though not going through with the act, certainly considers it.
The absolute value of the individual human being is believed in only as a secondary value; it stands well below the needs of efficient production. We have finally come to serve the machine. The machine must not be stopped, marred, left dirty, or outmoded. Only men can be left marred, stopped, dirty, and alone. (1994, 60)
“Stopped, dirty, and alone” is certainly an accurate description of some of Miller’s characters, but perhaps not so much the men as the women that they exhaust, devour, and almost without exception abandon in their despair: Kate Keller mourning first the disappearance and then suicide of her son, the suicide of her husband, and on the brink of abandonment by son Chris; and Linda Loman, widow of Willy, and emotionally abandoned by her two sons. Perhaps more, it is the anonymous and isolated single women that linger in the perpetual dusk of Miller’s backgrounds and off-stages, the insinuated bars and grimy hotel rooms, such as A Memory of Two Mondays’ Patricia, or Salesman’s eternally anonymous yet vital The Woman.
Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops—but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds—but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. (110)
For both Miller and Forster, this injunction is directed toward the micro and the macro: machine as mechanism and machine as social systems. However, the key is the transposition in the economy of value; if machines were conceived (in both senses) to aid and support human life, the logic of industrial capitalism (one reason Marx is so often adduced in discussions of Miller) demands that the means of production be elevated above the operators. The “machine” in this sense necessarily evokes the economic substructure of industrial capital, by which “the common man” is enslaved, even literally devoured; as Willy Loman angrily tells Howard (in what might be an inspiration for Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange): “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!” (Miller 2009, 181). Miller’s plays, however, seem to demonstrate that this is not only possible but inevitable in the period of industrial capital, efficiency, and cost-benefit analyses.
You have only to look about you at this moment to realize with what sinister speed the machine is getting us into its power […] Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements, and everything else that makes up our environment […] In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. (189–90)
For Orwell, the revolution in mankind’s capacity to alter its environment leads equally to the gramophone and industrialized weapons of mass destruction. Crucially, a world in which machines are necessary is for Orwell unhealthy. What is it, one might wonder, that machines “cannot [re]produce”? For Forster, “the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something ‘good enough’ had long since been accepted by our race” (Forster 2001, “The Machine Stops”, 93). For Walter Benjamin, the “bloom” is the “aura” that results from the unique, the hand-crafted: “a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence” (22). Perhaps it is this aura of singularity that is invariably missing in Miller’s constitutionally dissatisfied characters struggling to assert their individuality in an age of anonymous homogeneity and machine replication.
It is precisely these concerns that interest Miller. In Salesman, Willy Loman, crushed financially by machines and metaphorically by the capitalist machinery, is angered when his wife buys “American-type cheese,” “whipped,” and Willy asks, genuinely perplexed, “How can they whip cheese?”—an echo of Orwell’s profound disaffection with “factory-made, foil-wrapped cheese and ‘blended’ butter” (190). Cheese is perhaps the archetypal image of the “innocent” (prelapsarian) pastoral life that so many of Miller’s city-bound characters yearn for. Willy’s question has to do with both method and rationale: it is both a sincere technical query and an ethical question, gesturing toward some perceived but inarticulable transgression by the somewhat sinister “they.” Orwell recalls a conversation with hop-pickers, asking why they did not form a union he was told “‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know; but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent” (44). Miller, Forster, and Orwell foresee/witness a radical and irreversible alteration of the nature of our environment, one that precipitates yet further, deeper change. Necessarily, as Darwin informed us, if the environment changes, so must the native organism; this is what leads to the failure of intergenerational communication we see in Miller’s works as the young adapt to an environment that has outmoded their fathers.
However, if machines dehumanize, they also elevate and confer status, if the shift from the human to posthuman is accepted. In A Memory of Two Mondays, Larry, overburdened with care, slipping into middle age, decides to buy an Auburn, a stylish but impractical car that gives him a sense of freedom that he feels has been absent from a life devoted to family and vocation. Defending his choice to the more pragmatic Gus, who asks him when it comes time to sell who’s “gonna buy an Auburn,” Larry replies that he’s “sick of dreaming about things. They’ve got the most beautifully laid-out valves in the country on that car, and I want it, that’s all” (Miller 1958, 342). A connoisseur of engine parts, not simply the emergent entity itself but very specifically the “valves,” Larry chooses a car that does not retain its value, a willful if ultimately futile rebellion against the system of exchange. Larry’s decision, evidence of a mid-life crisis, is more than vanity; machines supplement, augment, enlarge ones being. To be at one with machines is also the epitome of success; when superannuated Willy Loman confronts and is fired by his young boss, Howard, the latter is preoccupied with a wire-recording machine, telling Willy that it is “the most terrific machine I ever saw in my life” (Miller 1958, 177). For the newly immigrated Rodolpho in A View From the Bridge, machines confer not simply social status but ontological validity; asked by Eddie why he needs a motorcycle and cannot rely on walking or public transport, he passionately argues that “the machine, the machine is necessary […] a man who rides up on a great machine, this man is responsible, this man exists” (Miller 1958, 394–95). For Rodolpho, escaping the poverty and stagnation of a postwar Europe bankrupted by both war and US loans, to exist is to embrace the mechanistic. Machines then paradoxically offer the possibility of self-transcendence, power, status, and also of mass dehumanization.
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence, we are all handymen: each with his little machines. (1)
Very explicitly they argue that the human body is not simply a figurative machine but a literal one. One might suggest that there is little that is either controversial or innovative about this idea, one whose origins can be traced to Plato’s dualism, and subsequently Galen and Vesalius’ masterworks of early anatomy. However, clearly the possibility of conceiving of organic bodies in this linguistic paradigm of “machines” is both modified by and predicated on the conceptual and social fact of industrialization. Deleuze and Guattari mean that bodies are composites, entelechies of myriad complex functioning micro-machines, that these composites themselves interact with one another as machines interact, drawing power, yes, but also producing desire and its satisfaction. Troublingly, as Miller writes above, human value stands below that of the machine to such an extent that in order to theorize the organic former, we must take recourse to the synthetic latter. This may seem innocuous, but it speaks powerfully of metaphors of efficiency that are deeply personal for Miller. Their enigmatic notion that “we are all handymen” resonates with Miller’s own views on not simply the mechanization of urban space, but of the individual and his or her environment.
In either understanding, mechanization and the growing dominance of and reliance upon machines, engines, inorganic systems both inside and outside the home radically altered the nature not simply of the environment but of the human beings striving simply “to be” within it. For Miller, this posed profound problems for his characters, striving already to accommodate themselves to an ideology of self-reliance in an economic and ideological machinery unsympathetic to what might be considered traditional social/community values, evident when Willy Loman appeals to Howard for a small regular wage and is reminded that affection and service have no place in the machinery of business. One might suggest that what is at stake in this period of transition is humanistic values, ones that seem, in the bourgeoning posthuman cities, to have been superseded by more pragmatic concerns. It is these deeply resonant possibilities that Miller interrogates in a series of plays, each of which is invested in the human condition in the age of industrial capitalism.
It is in his first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, that Miller first demonstrates his interest in engines and machinery, and as S. C. Gordon notes, “questions of luck, freedom and self-making” invested with an urgency in Depression-era America (511). One of his least successful works—in his own estimation “the play failed” (Centola, 349)—in its fascination with the intersections between fatalism and free will (clearly influenced by Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex) it is nevertheless important for Miller’s development as a major playwright. The play is about a man who “wants to know where he begins and the world begins; where he leaves off, the world begins” (Centola, 349). We might think of this either literally or metaphorically. For Rodolpho in A View from the Bridge, mankind is augmented by machine, and collapsing the boundaries between each and entering into a symbiotic (cybernetic) ontological partnership is desirable. This relationship also is central to The Man Who Had All the Luck: David Beeves is an untrained auto mechanic, and the play opens with “two car horns […] honking impatiently,” demanding his attention, service, and care (Miller 2009, 100). It is clear here and throughout that David exists to serve the machines that noisily, even threateningly, surround the imaginary off-stage. Troublingly, as we realize very soon, the sense of threat comes from the fact that Beeves is self-taught, inexperienced, and in his own estimation simply lucky.
It is no exaggeration to say that all of the action in the play is facilitated by malfunctioning or broken cars. In this play we see the first of many road deaths in Miller’s works, when Dan Dibble accidentally runs down Andrew Falk, the father of David’s intended, while driving a car to David’s repair shop. Tellingly, this is a brutal and literal collision of the mechanical and the organic, one that pre-empts Miller’s more philosophical and figurative explorations of this theme both here and in his later works. Gordon dismisses this symbolically potent moment, commenting that “Suddenly, randomly, the father is killed in an off-stage car accident” (512). However, it is far from random. In the first case, Andrew aggressively opposed the marriage of David and Hester, and so it is only because of his death that the marriage can go ahead. More significantly, Andrew was pushing his broken car along the road as Dan drove his broken car along the same road.
The second scene turns entirely on the dramatic suspense over whether David can repair the engine of Dibble’s Marmon. If successful, he is assured of a lucrative position servicing the tractors and other machinery on Dibble’s flourishing mink farm. Shortly after the death of her father, Hester finds David laboring under the engine. He tells her “I never heard an engine make that sound, I took the pan off, I took the head off, I looked at the valves; I just don’t know what it is, Hess! It’s turning off centre somewhere and I can’t find it, I can’t!” (Miller 2009, 125). Gus, an Austrian immigrant and experienced professional mechanic, happens to stroll past, and manages easily to fix the engine. David, although attempting to share credit with Gus, is rewarded with lucrative contracts. Feeling some shame at having benefited from Gus, he initially rejects the offer on the basis that he has not got “the machinery,” before being told “But you’ve got the machinery” as Dan agrees to furnish his garage (Miller 2009, 135–36). Gus, on the other hand, sees his own workshop close and is subsequently employed by a slightly guilty David.
Crucially, there are two central plot points in the play, the “luck” in the story, and each has to do with a motor car, specifically a broken engine. In a world undergoing rapid mechanization, one that fuels and feeds a ravenous economy, David’s value is directly and proportionally correlated with his capacity to service engines. But, in Miller’s world cars and engines are narratologically operative; without them, the plot would stall.
When there was Winton Six I was here. When was Minerva car I was here. When was Stanley Steamer I was here, and Stearns Knight, and Marmon was good car […] When was Locomobile, and Model K Ford and Model N – all them different Fords, and Franklin was good car, Jordan Car, Reo car, Pierce Arrow, Cleveland car – all them was good cars. All them times I was here. (Miller 1958, 370)
Gus refers to cars as though they were discrete eras, epochs, defining moments in his own life, but also the life of the nation. Indeed, finally he equates the cars with “them times.” His life has been spent in the service of machines in a literal sense but also figuratively. What is most apparent in this—and in the play that takes as its central metaphor the possibility of the substitution of malfunctioning or simply outworn elements—is that the warehousemen are replacements and replaceable parts subordinated to the engines and commercial machinery they maintain. This is made most evident in the character Tom Kelly, a drunk, apparently on the brink of being fired after receiving a final warning and still coming in inebriated on the day the owner is due to inspect the shop. At one point Larry, with a preternatural knowledge of engine parts and where they are stored, sends young Bert to the third floor to get an obscure shaft for a 1922 truck. Moments later as the owner enters, Agnes the office secretary asks Larry “why don’t you put him up on the third floor” (Miller 1958, 352). This is Miller’s most overt analogy for the aging and psychically exhausted person and machine parts.
I was driving along, you understand? And I was fine. I was even observing the scenery. You can imagine, me looking at scenery, on the road every week of my life. But it’s so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield and just let the warm air bathe over me. And then all of a sudden I’m goin’ off the road! I’m tellin’ ya, I absolutely forgot I was driving. If I’d’ve gone the other way over the white line I might’ve killed somebody. (Miller 1958, 132)
In the most basic sense, we see here a state of mind: Willy Loman has forgotten how to sell, what it means to be a salesman, and has acknowledged his profound failure to become a “masterful man.” As Irving Jacobson writes, in Miller’s plays “The consequences of failing to attain prominence and to transform society into a home are loneliness, frustration, and ultimately despair” (252). Once again, the action of the play, the plot, depends upon the car. In this scene, Willy is subconsciously drawn to the nature that he finds so starkly absent in the cities—we see here a desire to be in the trees, exposed to the sun, to not reach the destination of yet another city but to enjoy the interstitial, arterial, but rural connective spaces between places. In an odd way, his is a desire to travel, but to not arrive, to be nowhere.
- Linda:
Well, on the first there’s sixteen dollars on the refrigerator
- Willy:
Why sixteen?
- Linda:
Well, the fan belt broke, so it was a dollar eighty.
- Willy:
But it’s brand new.
- Linda:
Well, the man said that’s the way it is. Till they work themselves in, y’know. (They move through the wall-line into the kitchen.)
- Willy:
I hope we didn’t get stuck on that machine.
- Linda:
They got the biggest ads of any of them!
- Willy:
I know, it’s a fine machine. What else?
- Linda:
Well, there’s nine-sixty for the washing machine. And for the vacuum cleaner there’s three and a half due on the fifteenth. Then the roof, you got twenty-one dollars remaining.
- Willy:
It don’t leak, does it?
- Linda:
No, they did a wonderful job. Then you owe Frank for the carburetor.
- Willy:
I’m not going to pay that man! That goddam Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car! (Miller 1958, 148)
Here is a clear example, as Miller said (1994, 60), that “we have finally come to serve the machine.” In one sense, perhaps unattuned to the importance of a growing dependence on machines, this is simply modern life. Things break, we must replace them. However, a reading more sensitive to the fact that these machines are new, alien, inhospitable, enables a more sinister sense that Willy Loman strives to support not his wife (endlessly darning stockings) but machines, so, to return to Forster, “that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally” (Forster 2001, 105).
All My Sons is explicitly about a confrontation between primitivism and industrialization. The opening scene is, once more, neo-pastoral: a group of men sitting among a copse of poplars in an affluent unnamed American suburb. Attempting to determine whether Joe and Kate Keller’s son Larry might have succumbed to the literal and metaphoric machinery of modern warfare on November 25th, the Keller’s neighbor Frank is drawing a horoscope; if he finds that day to be “a favorable day for Larry,” then they might safely assume he is simply MIA. Very quickly, the fact of broken machines intrudes into this oddly premodern narrative when Frank’s wife, Lydia, enters and asks Frank to fix a toaster, although it transpires that she has plugged in the wrong machine, as Frank tells her, “If you want the toaster to work don’t plug in the malted mixer” (Miller 1958, 63). Again, one might read these moments as somehow unrelated both to the central concerns of the play and Miller’s broader social concerns. However, the occurrence of broken and malfunctioning machines, and their usurpation of idyllic spaces, is too frequent and well-placed to be random. Once again Miller draws our attention to perhaps the defining phenomenon of the transition between the human and the posthuman, a growing reliance on machinery in both domestic and work spaces. Crucially, this proto-posthumanism has important implications in terms of gender roles. Traditionally, certainly during the period in which Miller is writing, the kitchen was the jurisdiction of the housewife. However, here she too is alienated from domestic work and space by the encroaching machinery.
I’m in business, a man is in business. A hundred and twenty cracked, you’re out of business. You got a process, the process don’t work you’re out of business. You don’t know how to operate, your stuff is no good, they close you up, they tear up your contracts. What the hell’s it to them? You lay forty years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take forty years, let them take my life away? (Miller 1958, 115)
Once again, we return to Orwell and to Miller’s “they,” the sinister pronoun for business, for government, for hostile society and the “mass man.” For Joe, his responsibility ends with his family and with his business. Part of the irony of course is that functioning fighter planes are designed to end life, to kill, but here the malfunction results in another irony, the unwilled kamikaze of one hundred and twenty US servicemen. The manufacturing process is crucial here because it requires the skilful utilization of a range of complex machines to produce machines and machine parts on which human life depends, and to which human life is secondary. A failure in manufacturing process results in failures of social and human responsibility, leading to an inevitable chain reaction of ultimately catastrophic mechanical failures.
A metaphorical reading would have the engine as society, the cylinder as the individual, and the hairline crack as those members of society, the Steves and the Joes, whose sense of community is restricted to the idea that “the world had a forty foot front, it ended at the building line” (Miller 1958, 121). Miller then, through the use of machines, raises and interrogates profound questions about the nature of contemporary society, responsibility, and in the context of the war intergenerational culpability—as Joe says in a moment of realization that precedes and precipitates his suicide, to Larry, they were “all my sons” (an idea explored in Lucy Kirkwood’s 2016 play The Children). Gerald Weales suggests “Joe [is] a peculiarly American product. He is a self-made man, a successful businessman ‘with the imprint of the machine-shop worker and boss still upon him’” (168).
Joe then is a product of a failed process, one might say, with a crack, possibly welded over, but inevitably destined to malfunction, and thereby disrupt the soft machinery of family and by extension the wider society. At the heart of Miller’s play is a paradox: he is concerned that individuality is at stake in a hostile mechanical world, but at the same time he expresses deep concerns about the individualism that is at the core of the American philosophy of “self-reliance.” For Miller there is an imperative for survival both to embrace and to be cautious of a potentially destructive self-concern. If we are “all handymen: each with his little machines,” the role we play in the wider machinery into which we are integrated gains significance. This role of handyperson has to do not simply with the body, of course, but with the machinery of society. America, for Miller, is, in David Beeves’ words, “turning off centre somewhere.” Perhaps the role of the socially aware playwright then is akin to that of a mechanic, a handyperson; if the machinery in the broadest ideological, political, and humanistic senses is turning off center, it is drama that not only gives voice to “well-defined expression of profound social needs,” but which offers some possibility for providing for those needs. Drama then is indeed a very “serious business.”
The human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. (4)
This then is the posthuman, a space in which the synthetic and the natural combine in apparent symbiosis. What I have tried to show here is that Miller was a poet of the proto-posthuman, concerned with the developing subordination of mankind to the machinery that it had created in order, ostensibly, to improve life. Efficiency for Miller comes at a cost to self, to family, to society, and ultimately to the species. If this was the case for Miller, Forster, and Orwell, writing in the early and mid-twentieth century, then the case would be even stronger now, in the beginning of a new millennium that has witnessed and continues to see exponential progress in technology and machinery. One wonders what Miller would have written in the world of Twitter, smart phones, tablets, Wi-Fi, Ear Pods, I-Pads, augmented and virtual reality. Indeed, one might wonder what Miller would make of the fact that this chapter, this book, is a product of electronic messages, electronic files, user interfaces, digital printing, and often unreliable word-processing pro …
- 1.
Robert A. Martin, “Editor’s Introduction,” The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller (London: Methuen, 1994), xxvi. Both Brecht and Miller were brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Whether Miller was aware of Brecht during the early stages of his career is unclear. See Weisstein, 373–96; Kern, 157–65.
- 2.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the screenplay for the French language film of The Crucible, and although denying direct influence, Miller says Sartre was “always attractive to me in a vague way.” See Centola, 347.
- 3.
A fact Miller acknowledges in an essay “American Theater,” noting that the “bulk of [the audience] is middle class.” See Miller (1994, 32).
- 4.
Quoted in Aleks Sierz and Dominic Cavendish, “The Theatre That Changed Drama,” The Telegraph, 11 January 2006.