FAREWELL ARTHUR MILLER

Years ago I believed that Miller's plays were much better as reading than as theater. His heavy, slowly paced stories were great and emotionally moving, I thought, but, in performance, prone to melodrama under the worst circumstances, and boring under the best. Of course, I was wrong. Miller's plays are simply hard to perform, requiring actors and directors to dig deeply through weighty philosophical, cultural, and political issues in order to get through to the truth of human existence that lies beneath: Miller's plays are great because he hits the audience with a double whammy of hardcore intellectualism infused with raw emotional reality. When a production truly commits to executing this double whammy, it becomes quite clear that Miller's plays are among the best ever written by an American.

(I've even seen dedicated high school kids pull this off. One of my prouder moments as a teacher was being involved with a kickass production of All My Sons back in 2000 at Sterling High School in Baytown. It was one of those cool moments when you have the right people with the right kind of artistic hunger all working together on the same project. These kids put themselves totally on the line, and the result was just beautiful.)

The thing I really love about Arthur Miller's work, however, is his sense social conscience. Death of a Salesman indicts capitalism and the so-called "American Dream." All My Sons takes on corrupt capitalists, profiteering at the expense of American airmen during WWII. The Crucible attacks McCarthyism by way of the Salem witch trials. In other words, Miller was an expert practitioner of Real Art.

Miles, below, hit the general info about Miller's life and work. As for me, I offer this essay Miller wrote nearly a decade ago when The Crucible was being made into a film:

Why I Wrote The Crucible:
An Artist's Answer to Politics

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or rs in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks sing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however there was often a despairing pity mixed with "Well, they must have done something." Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

Click here for the rest.

(By the way, I believe that the word "rs" in the excerpt above means "revolutionaries," but I'm not one hundred percent certain about that.)

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