Article
Arthur
Miller
Robert
Cohen
in Los Angeles
Arthur Miller
1915-2005
published in Plays International, March 2005
I first encountered Arthur Miller – or at least his work
– in the Boston railway station on a cold day at Christmastime,
1955. I was seventeen; my father had needed a courier to send
a legal document to a client there and, no professional services
available that holiday weekend, I found myself in the icy city
with eight hours to kill before my return train home. Sleet-slicked
streets and a freezing gale prevented me from walking about
town, so I turned to the skimpy bookshelf in the station’s
newsstand and saw a paperback copy of Death of a Salesman staring
back at me. The title was a shocker, and, though I knew nothing
of theatre or drama at the time, somehow seemed familiar. I
picked it up (for 75 cents, as I recall), took it back to one
of the waiting room’s hard, wooden benches, and raced
through it in a single, electrifying sitting. And then, as the
wallop of Willy’s funeral began to subside, I turned back
to page one and read it all over again.
I can barely report the tsunami of feeling and confusion that
had come over me. I had read nothing remotely like this play
(and was it really a play?). It seemed not fiction but truth,
not drama but life, life itself, life in the raw. It seemed
as though I was looking not at but inside my parents, not at
but inside the lives of people I realized I had thus far known
but superficially.
I
have since seen Dustin Hoffman (on Broadway), Judd Hirsch (in
Toronto) and Brian Dennehy (in Chicago) do their Willys. I saw
the Broadway premieres of A View From the Bridge (a one-act
play at that point), A Memory of Two Mondays, Incident at Vichy,
The Price and, most recently, The Ride Down Mount Morgan with
Patrick Stewart. I’ve seen more student productions of
The Crucible than I can recall, have directed After the Fall,
and read for the first time, just two weeks before he died,
Miller’s sadly underappreciated Broken Glass. Each of
these works has touched me in like manner. Each has set me on
my heels, forcing me to come to terms with of my own compromises
and contradictions.
It is axiomatic that Miller is a social playwright. His plays
are acts of protest; his 1957 conviction on a contempt of Congress
charge (eventually overturned) for refusing to name names to
the outrageous House Un-American Activities Committee, and his
1965 ascendancy to the presidency of P.E.N. (an international
literary association focusing on free expression) had put his
personal shoulder squarely behind his dramatic wheel. “For
myself, anyway,” Miller has said, “the challenge
is still the Elizabethan one, the public address on the street
corner.”
His
middle years, after Salesman, however, did not prove a great
period for public address on Broadway. During the fifties, he
later recalled, “the theatre was retreating into an era
of psycho-sexual romanticism… an era of gauze,”
for which he considered Tennessee Williams to be both cause
and beneficiary. So it became Miller’s goal to tear down
the scrims and force his audiences to see what was going on
around them.
A
later generation of dramatists was to focus its protest on behalf
of selected target populations – largely blacks, Jews,
gays, women, and ethnics of every variety. But Miller’s
protests, by and large, were on behalf of just about everyone.
Ride Down Mount Morgan, his last Broadway play, broadcast the
author’s fiery positions on men, women, children, parents,
marriage, race, sex, death, Jews, non-Jews, Christianity, capitalism,
socialism, sexuality, suicide, betrayal, bigamy, and the Reagan-Bush
administration.
Yet
his drama, as he said in a 1955 essay, “is the drama of
the whole man.” To Miller, theatre must serve its public
the way Greek theatre – and Greek religion – served
the ancient Athenian polis: helping its audience find “the
right way to live together.”
And what remains to us of Miller’s work is exactly what
grabbed me in that Boston train station fifty years ago. It
was not the economic plight of an aging salesman but the searingly
human predicament – utterly specific yet profoundly archetypal
- of Willy Loman.
Miller’s
testimonial to Lee J. Cobb’s creation of that role speaks
volumes. In the first weeks of rehearsal the heavyset Cobb had
been, in Miller’s words, “a great lump, a sick seal,
a mourning walrus.” But “then, one afternoon,”
says Miller, “Lee rose from his chair and looked at Milly
Dunnock and there was a silence. And then he said, ‘I
was driving along, you understand, and then all of a sudden
I’m going off the road.’ And the theatre vanished.
The stage vanished, The chill of an age-old recognition shuddered
my spine; a voice was sounding in the dimly lit air up front,
a created spirit, an incarnation, a Godlike creation was taking
place; a new human being was being formed before all our eyes,
born for the first time on this earth, made real by an act of
will, by an artist’s summoning up of all his memories
and his intelligence; a birth was taking place above the meaningless
traffic below; a man was here transcending the limits of his
body and his own history…. I knew then that something
astounding was being made here. It would have been almost enough
for me without even opening the play.”
Miller’s
exaltation was not really about Cobb, however. It was about
himself and his creation. It’s exactly what I felt reading
the play in that chilly railway waiting room – where there
were no actors to guide me. It’s what the American –
and now the English, Chinese, Russian and global audiences in
dozens of countries have taken from the play in its various
incarnations. It is “the drama of the whole man”
– the drama of all of us.
—Robert
Cohen
