From the beginning, the idea of writing a play was entwined with my very conception of myself. Playwriting was an act of self-discovery from the start and would always be; it was kind of a license to say the unspeakable, and I would never write anything good that did not somehow make me blush. From the beginning, writing meant freedom, a spreading of wings, and once I got the first inkling that others were reached by what I wrote, an assumption arose that some kind of public business was happening inside me, that what perplexed or moved me must move others. (Miller 1987, 212)
Miller’s intuitive awareness of the capability of his art to move an audience remained an inviolable impetus for every play he wrote over the next seventy years. Moreover, his nascent inkling that others were reached by what he wrote was prophetic, for Miller’s work—written mostly in the twentieth century—continues to be relevant to twenty-first-century audiences.
Indeed, Arthur Miller was a man of the twentieth century: His life and career immersed in the cataclysmic events that defined what often is called “America’s Century.” Miller’s ninety years spanned almost the entire time period. Born in 1915 while World War I raged, he died in 2005 in the Age of Terrorism. His world view and moral principles were formed in the crucible of the political, economic, and social events of the era: the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the Red Scare and Communist Witch Hunts, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and Vietnam, the Cold War, Reaganism, the Arab-Israel conflicts, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the New World Order. In his professional and personal life, Arthur Miller boldly confronted the conflicts of his time. In his plays, fictions, and essays, he frequently took stands, popular and unpopular, on moral, social, and political problems—whether we liked hearing them or not. The great themes of his work and career—family and society, individual and social conscience, private and public responsibility, and guilt and betrayal—are what engaged societies throughout the world in his time and continue to do so in our own.
At the start of his career, Arthur Miller was grouped with his contemporary and near-contemporary American playwrights. Tennessee Williams and Miller dominated the 1940s and 1950s on Broadway with such plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A View from the Bridge—although both were often in the shadow of Eugene O’Neill’s earlier successes and the posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1956, when O’Neill’s reputation resurged. Edward Albee was included in the 1960s with the successful Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance, enshrining the four as the major mid-twentieth-century American playwrights. When Miller died in 2005, just short of his ninetieth birthday, the worldwide headlines in the media proclaimed his status.
The period since Arthur Miller’s death has provided ample time for critics to consider his ultimate place as one of the major dramatists of world theater. As his biographer Christopher Bigsby noted, “When he died, all manner of people suddenly realized, what they should have known all along, that losing Arthur Miller was like losing Chekhov, or Ibsen, or Strindberg” (Bigsby 2005, 17). His world vision, large social themes, and his connection to the universal human condition make him so attractive to worldwide audiences. His plays flourish in American and international productions because his great themes cross all borders.
The 2015 centennial of Arthur Miller’s birth was celebrated around the globe with acclaimed revivals of his plays, media documentaries, academic conferences, and new criticism. Much of Miller scholarship is fed by performance, and the last years have seen striking productions of Miller’s major and lesser-known plays, including the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon staging Death of a Salesman and the London production of avant-garde director Ivo van Hove’s remaking of A View from the Bridge. English audiences also saw world premieres of dramas that never had been produced: a staged version of The Hook (the screenplay that Miller wrote about the Sicilian American dockworkers in Brooklyn, which he and Elia Kazan peddled in Hollywood in 1951), and his first play, No Villain. In New York, a Yiddish production of Death of a Salesman played off Broadway, as did Incident at Vichy, featuring Richard Thomas as Von Berg. Von Hove directed an acclaimed revival of The Crucible, and a Broadway revival of The Price starred Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shaloub, Jessica Hecht, and Danny DeVito.
Interest in Miller’s work remains unabated. Most contemporary drama scholars are familiar with the adulation of Miller in Britain where, as the director David Thacker famously said regarding Miller’s reputation: “We consider him only a little lower than Shakespeare, but a little higher than God” (Brater, 7). In 2019, London—always a hotbed of Miller activity—witnessed an unprecedented five productions of his plays in stunning new performances: A mixed race staging of Death of A Salesman at the Young Vic, an all-female casting of The Crucible by The Yard, a race-blind production of The American Clock at the Old Vic, a revival of The Price featuring David Suchet as Solomon, and a major revival of All My Sons with the American actors Sally Field and Bill Pullman and the English stars Jenna Coleman and Colin Morgan. In Miller’s native New York, a major revival of All My Sons, featuring Tracy Letts and Annette Benning, caused considerable controversy when director Gregory Mosher withdrew from the production over a casting dispute. Off Broadway theatres also mounted The Archbishop’s Ceiling and two productions of The Crucible. Also, Brave New World produced a staged theatrical reading of The Hook, Miller’s unproduced 1949 screenplay. The American premiere of the work, which also spawned A View from the Bridge, took place at the Waterfront Barge Museum, docked in Red Hook, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Miller researched the waterfront. Thus, Miller’s drama continues—and will continue—to be relevant in the twenty-first century and consequently generate much theater and literary criticism.
….Whether he admits it or not, the actor wants to be not only believed and admired, but also loved; what may help to account for the dullness of the last campaign was the absence of affection for either [candidate]….By the end it seemed like an unpopularity contest, a competition for who was less disliked by more people than the other, a demonstration of negative consent. (Miller 2001, 44)
Today his plays, stories, essays, and speeches are filtered through the lens of twenty-first-century events, and there has been a surge of revivals instigated by contemporary events. The U.S. political climate keeps Miller’s work much in the news. Remarking on the frequent productions of The Crucible, Miller realized that the play is produced in a country whenever a political coup appears imminent or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown (Miller 1996, 162). Certainly, America’s political divisions, which continue unabated after the bruising presidential election, make it seem that Ivo Van Hove’s 2016 Broadway production was prescient. In 2018, when the accusations broke against Judge Brett Kavanaugh after his nomination to the Supreme Court, the hearings and investigations were compared to witch hunts, and many references were made to The Crucible. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Times, conservative columnist Suzanne Fields offered striking parallels to the play, maintaining that Brett Kavanaugh could play John Proctor. Moreover, one of President Trump’s favorite descriptions of the press and media is to call them the “Enemy of the People.” In 1950, Miller wrote his version of the Ibsen play of that title because of the Communist Witch Hunts. The President’s repeated use of the phrase spurred revivals of Miller’s drama on many world stages. Who would have thought that Donald Trump could promote Arthur Miller?
At his core, Arthur Miller was always an autobiographical writer whose many works illustrate the conflict between the private and public. Miller scholarship is on the cusp of reinvention as new resources about his personal and professional life become available to scholars. In 2018, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced its acquisition from the Miller Estate of the remainder of his papers, which includes not only drafts and original scripts of his plays, but also a cache of diaries, letters, notebooks, and personal correspondence. The center completed its cataloging in 2019 and the material is now available. Also, his daughter, Rebecca Miller, directed a critically acclaimed 2018 HBO documentary, Arthur Miller, Writer, that gave the opportunity to see an intimate portrait of her father in his own voice and love letters written to his wives: Mary Slattery, Marilyn Monroe, and Inge Morath. In addition, in 2019 the Arthur Miller Trust announced that Rebecca Miller is donating her father’s writing studio, which was located on his Tophet Road property in Roxbury, Connecticut, to the newly forming non-profit Arthur Miller Writing Studio organization, which will locate the studio next to the town library in Roxbury. Miller had this studio built when he moved from his original home in Roxbury at 153 Tophet Road to 232 Tophet Road in the spring of 1958. The studio was designed as a small space and then expanded slightly in the 1960s. There he wrote and revised plays such as After the Fall and The Price, screenplays including The Misfits, his autobiography Timebends, and his later plays. As the center of Miller’s creative life for almost half a century, this writing studio holds a signature place in American literary history. The studio will contain the original furnishings and the studio library of Miller and his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath.1 Thus, scrutiny of his letters, diaries, and correspondence at the Ransom Center and Miller’s studio promises to offer new perspectives on his life and especially his work.
In a special centennial section of The Arthur Miller Journal in 2015 titled, “Why Miller is Important,” Miller’s biographer Christopher Bigsby offered a fitting commentary as to why Miller will continue to be relevant: “This is his centenary. It will soon pass, but his plays will not, being re-imagined, re-invented and embraced by every generation, in every country, not as so many relics from a bygone age but as urgent messages about who we are and the world in which we live” (2).
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Miller’s large dramatic canon has always drawn scholars and theater critics from all disciplines with diverse approaches. Current Miller scholarship offers striking evaluations, increasingly from perspectives not seen before. This anthology brings together a group of established and emergent Miller scholars to provide new views of the relevance of Miller’s ideas to contemporary issues and to analyze why his works continue to resonate in cultures throughout the world. The collection includes a cross-section of critical perspectives and theories. We have divided the collection into three parts.
Part I: Miller and the American Dramatic Canon contains essays seeking to understand Miller and his continuing influence in the twenty-first century by exploring his role, along with Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, in shaping American cultural themes and establishing an American dramatic tradition that influenced the playwrights who followed them.
Livia Sacchetti examines how Miller created contemporary American tragedies by grounding them in the Greek classics and Ibsen. At the same time, he deeply imbued the plays with the political and social contradictions of his time, bending the laws of classical tragedy accordingly and bringing to the stage protagonists who are not immediately recognizable as heroic. She shows how the structure of three of his foundational plays—Death of Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge—place his characters in a tragic position by having them face an ineluctable “devouring time.”
Three essays connect Miller to his fellow major American playwrights. David Palmer traces how Eugene O’Neill created a new American theatrical ethos in which tragedy focused on how characters search for personal meaning. Examining O’Neill’s exploration of pipe dreams and relating this to Miller’s ideas about personal dignity in his 1949 essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Palmer argues that O’Neill and Miller together constructed one of the central elements in the conception of tragedy that emerged in many of the American dramatists who followed them.
The distinguished scholar Brenda Murphy examines the visions of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller in structuring their complicated family dramas, often depicting troubling relationships among parents and between siblings to challenge the dynamics of the American nuclear family. She shows how the families these two playwrights wrote about were markedly different. Miller’s conception of the family is fundamentally patriarchal. The families in his plays tend to be tight-knit units centered on a father who is a dominant presence, psychologically if not physically. On the other hand, Williams often represents the family as a post-patriarchal structure that has already disintegrated, resulting in a tenuous family unit characterized by dysfunctional relationships among its various members.
Michael Y. Bennett compares how Arthur Miller and Edward Albee explored the hopes and illusions of the American Dream by investigating crises of post-World War II American family life. His essay juxtaposes how Miller dramatized the effects of disillusionment on the American familial unit in late 1940s with Albee’s depiction of the early 1960s, when the countercultural rumblings put the very notion of American familial stability into question.
The final essays in this section focus on Miller’s influence on the American playwrights who followed him. Ellen B. Anthony explores how American women dramatists such as Lorraine Hansberry, Marsha Norman, Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage, and Annie Baker reconfigure and enhance two central themes in Miller’s drama: the family and the betrayal of the American Dream.
David Palmer demonstrates how the act of shaming works in Miller’s conception of tragedy and connects shaming to racism and other forms of bigotry. Grounding his argument in August Wilson’s contention that much of African American drama involves a “warrior” response to racist reduction, Palmer examines how Wilson’s warrior-rebellion theme can be found in many of Miller’s plays and how it operates in key African American dramas: Langston Hughes’s Mulatto, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, August Wilson’s Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks Topdog/Underdog, and Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.
In the final essay of Part I, E. Andrew Lee shows how Miller’s rejection of pessimism seems to distinguish his plays from the work of later American dramatists such as David Mamet and Sam Shepard, whose plays often seem more recalcitrant and unforgiving. Yet, Lee argues that Miller’s The Price evinces intriguing parallels with works by these two iconic postmodern dramatists: Mamet’s American Buffalo and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss. An examination of the parallels reveals The Price to be a harbinger of postmodern dramatic themes employed by both these writers.
Part II: Miller, the Writer includes essays that examine not only Miller’s drama but also his extensive output of fiction and essays. The first essay by Jan Balakian considers how to teach Miller in the college classroom. Departing from his most popular classroom plays, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, Balakian shows how his first Broadway hit, All My Sons, offers students the opportunity to read a powerful dramatization about social responsibility, acts and consequences, past and present, and the individual and society. She provides a blueprint for showing the relevance of these themes in contemporary culture.
Joshua E. Polster compares the Irish immigrant characters in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Miller’s one-act A Memory of Two Mondays. The discussion provides a greater understanding of the plays through their Irish characters and the important influence of O’Neill’s work on Miller’s playwriting, in addition to exploring similarities between the playwrights’ immigrant family histories.
Rupendra Guha Majumdar traces how one of Miller’s primary stage tropes—the trial—operates throughout his oeuvre. Majumdar focuses on the protagonist’s trauma as he struggles to regain his personal dignity before the “empty bench” of an impersonal social law. He shows how Death of a Salesman, An Enemy of the People, The Crucible, and After the Fall dramatize the existential significance of trials as sources of both trepidation and reflection in the characters.
Thiago Russo examines Miller’s late play The Ride Down Mt. Morgan as Miller’s lampooning of a pernicious individualism that arose in America during the 1980s. The Reagan era celebrated self-centeredness and greed and undermined the ideals of community and social justice that had been essential political guideposts for Miller. Russo also shows the play as a significant piece in Miller’s ongoing analysis of conflicting aspects of the American Dream.
The next two pieces in this section examine Miller’s non-dramatic writing. Matthew Roudané considers Miller’s substantial output of literary and non-literary essays. Like Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht, Miller was not only a playwright but also a prolific essayist who enjoyed the role of public intellectual. Roudané shows how Miller’s essays reveal his passionate commitment to social justice and human rights, his lifelong civic engagement with national and international politics, and his unwavering commitment to his art.
Similarly, Susan C. W. Abbotson examines Miller’s prodigious output of fiction. Although best known as a dramatist, Miller was also a skilled fiction writer, producing a novel, a novella, many short stories, and a children’s book. Abbotson’s essay explores how Miller’s central concerns about identity and commitment, guilt and responsibility, hope, and individual potential in his plays are illustrated in new and interesting ways in his fiction, exploring alternate avenues and formulas. Paying closer attention to his fictional output suggests new ways of looking at and understanding Miller’s career as a whole.
In this final essay of this section, Claire Conceison explores the significance of Miller’s encounters with China, including translation and dissemination of his texts in the People’s Republic, stagings of his plays by Chinese theater companies, his own 1983 direction of Death of a Salesman in Beijing in collaboration with Ying Ruocheng, and current retellings of that watershed event in new theater projects outside of China. This essay illuminates the important influence Miller’s involvement with China continues to have in the twenty-first century.
Part III: Miller and Contemporary Issues focuses on the relevance of Miller’s ideas to issues in twenty-first-century contemporary culture. Miller’s biographer Christopher Bigsby declares that: “Human rights were a central concern of Arthur Miller.” Bigsby’s essay addresses Miller’s significance as a lifelong, outspoken public intellectual and defender of human rights in political activities, such as his stand against HUAC and the Vietnam War, and his work as president of International PEN. Bigsby also traces the political underpinnings of Miller’s art.
Claire Gleitman’s essay examines the “suggestive similarities” between Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Both plays feature as their central male character a traveling salesman facing the potential collapse of his patriarchal status within his home. In each drama, females to some degree operate as an obstacle to the male’s quest to view himself as a successful, self-reliant male even as they operate as crucial ballasts for his self-esteem. Gleitiman’s discussion focuses on how the plays illustrate mid-twentieth-century anxieties about masculinity.
In the final essay in the collection, “Devouring Mechanization: Miller and the Proto-Post-Humanism,” Peter Sloan explores the profound and irresolvable antagonism that Arthur Miller strives to understand and articulate between human beings and their changing environment. Many of his plays address people’s alienation from themselves and others amid urbanization and industrialization. In the twenty-first century, these issues come into sharper focus as we move into a post-human digital age where machines as extensions of the person and presumed enhancements of personal experience become more prevalent.
Taken together, these essays not only contribute to the ongoing consideration of Miller and his work, but also affirm his relevance to contemporary and future generations of students, scholars, theater audiences, and practitioners.
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See “Editor’s Note,” The Arthur Miller Journal, Spring 2019, vol. 14, 1.