When ”The American Clock” opened on Broadway in 1980, all the signs for success seemed auspicious indeed.
A new play by Arthur Miller that dealt with some of the same themes as his classic ”Death of a Salesman,” ”American Clock” had been warmly received at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., a few months before, and the Broadway production had been eagerly anticipated.
To Miller`s bitter dismay, the play, which he had revised for Broadway, was harshly reviewed and closed almost immediately.
Unlike many Broadway failures that vanish forever, however, ”American Clock” has gone on to a happier life elsewhere. Rewritten and restaged, it has since been presented in Los Angeles and in London, where it played to full houses and was nominated for the Olivier Award as best play of the season.
Under the direction of Austin Pendleton, a new American production recently enjoyed a short run at the Williamstown (Mass.) Theater Festival.
Even if ”American Clock” had not been rethought after the Broadway debacle, changing times alone would have had a dramatic impact on the play`s reception.
A panoramic view of the Depression whose focus ranges from Wall Street and Harlem to Iowa and the small towns along the Mississippi River, the play opens with a rousing rendition of ”We`re in the Money” by the entire ensemble, a huge cast of 52 whose constantly changing characters will portray the vast sweep of America itself.
The year is 1929, the mood one of euphoria and hysterical speculation;
everyone thinks the boom will last forever.
Then comes the stock market crash, and the quickly shifting vignettes turn bleak: Ruined stockbrokers jump from office windows, farmers default on loans and lose their family farms, banks fail, people lose life savings, the jobless and destitute take to the roads or camp homeless in parks and streets. Throughout the play, a characteristic American optimism struggles valiantly against an increasingly frightening reality whose contemporary resonance is inescapable long before the closing number, when the whole cast reappears to sing ”Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” as a lone voice wonders, ”Could it happen again?”
Miller attributes the Broadway failure of ”American Clock” to several factors, including a misguided staging of the play and his own capitulation to pressures to rewrite the material in ways that conformed to expectations but robbed the work of its true voice.
”It was a very indecisive production that seemed not to make up its mind what it was,” he said dourly.
A tall, imposing figure whose gaunt face looks craggy enough for Mt. Rushmore, Miller had been a silent, somber presence at Williamstown; he folded his long frame into a theater seat, put up his feet and watched rehearsals for hours at a time without saying anything. However, that seems more a function of temperament than of disapproval; he pronounced himself quite pleased with the current state of ”American Clock.”
”It`s found its form,” Miller said. ”The spirit of the whole thing was far grayer on Broadway, but it was never intended that way; it was intended as a six-ring circus, which is what it is now. This play was originally conceived as a kind of mural for the stage; a mural is a painting that has a great social theme, and inside of the big design are small portraits.
”Onstage, it`s a kind of vaudeville. In vaudeville people get up and tell you what they`re doing; it`s a presentational piece of work. It just took a long time to find its production form.”
Those themes are chillingly familiar at times. Toward the end of the play, a wealthy financier who sold all his stocks just before the crash looks down from his Riverside Drive apartment at the people living in cardboard boxes along the street; at night the campfires of the homeless flicker up and down the Hudson River.
”It`s like Calcutta down there,” the rich man says. ”Remarkable, the humor they still have-but of course, people still blame themselves rather than the government. But there`s never been a society that hasn`t had a clock running on it, and you can`t help wondering-How long?”
Then, as now, the mood was an odd mixture. Pendleton sees the play as embodying what he called ”the peculiar energy of the Depression.”
”You think of bleakness and despair,” he added, ”but in the scenes themselves and in the crazy improvisational form of it, there is this great energy. Arthur wanted to capture the atmosphere he remembered of the Depression; he called it manic-depressive, the despair and the energy almost feeding each other as they do in manic states.”
Both Miller and Pendleton fear, however, that much of what carried America through the Depression may since have been lost.
