A knock at the door and, quickly, Arthur Miller is there.
His face, famously rough-hewn, has fleshed out a little, and his tall frame is slightly bent; but, at 84, after 65 years as a working playwright, he has entered into one of the most productive periods of his career; and now, casually dressed and contentedly seated here in his Manhattan apartment, he is alert and eager to talk about his miraculous year of 1999.
“Death of a Salesman,” 50 years after its premiere, triumphantly returned to Broadway in a Goodman Theatre production that won four Tony Awards, and a taped version of which begins a round of screenings at 7 p.m. Sunday on the Showtime cable channel. Soon after “Sa
lesman’s” success came the opening at the Royale Theatre of a well-received, still-running revival of “The Price,” a four-character drama of 1968 that resounds with many of the themes in “Salesman.”
In between, there was last autumn’s premiere of the heralded opera, produced by Lyric Opera of Chicago, based on his “A View from the Bridge”; and coming in March is the Broadway debut of Miller’s 1991 “The Ride Down Mount Morgan,” with Patrick Stewart. There is even a possibility that “The Crucible,” the witch-hunt parable written in 1953 at the height of the Red scare in America, will follow with a Broadway revival a little later.
“Mr. Peters’ Connection,” a new work introduced in New York in 1998, recently finished a successful run at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and is scheduled for another engagement in London next spring.
Meanwhile, of course, Miller is working on a new play.
What’s it about? “Too early to tell,” he says. “But then, I never talk much about that. I always say that `Death of a Salesman’ is about a salesman, and he dies.”
This little joke, which he has often repeated, pleases Miller. He stretches out in the straightback living room chair where he has settled, takes off his glasses and smiles.
Married since 1967 to the photographer Inge Morath, Miller leads a good life with her in “a big, old rambling house” in suburban Connecticut. “I never went to the theater much,” he says, “and I have to say that I still don’t come down to New York to see many shows.” But, after years of relative calm, his career is moving at such a fast pace these days that he often has to commute to this East Side apartment for those prolonged periods of rehearsals and conferences on his Broadway productions.
The apartment is small but comfortably furnished; its walls are decorated with several posters of productions of his plays, a handy bit of decor to have when memory fails and he wants to check on a date or name or place from his past shows. (The “Salesman” poster, with Dennehy looming in the foreground, is just inside the apartment’s entrance.)
He has seen hundreds of performances of “Salesman” over the years, but the Goodman version, directed by Robert Falls with Brian Dennehy in the title role, was something special. “It had always been a cinematic play,” he says, “in the way it unfolded Willy Loman’s life in flashback; and this production recognized and took advantage of that in the movement of the set. It was a very ’90s show.”
The opera of “View,” he recalls, he somewhat reluctantly signed on to at the urging of an old friend, librettist Arnold Weinstein. Its success pleased him, but, in retrospect, he says he’s not surprised that it transferred well into lyric theater. “All the emotions in `View’ are very overt, because of the nature of the people. They don’t cover over their feelings, and that translates well into opera.”
All of Miller’s plays, however, deal with people who eventually must come face to face with their feelings, and their failings. This, as Miller wryly and wisely notes, “is at the heart of Greek drama too.” And it may account for the fact that however tightly tied to a particular period or location, his plays continue to be produced as the decades roll by. “They’re not about social problems,” he maintains. “They’re about people.”
Two periods of American history are crucial in understanding Miller’s plays, however. One is the anti-Communist scare of the late ’40s and ’50s; the other is the Depression of the 1930s. Themes from that time, when the American Dream collapsed and when, as Miller says, “the whole system failed,” are evident in “Salesman,” “The Price” and the family drama, “The American Clock.”
Miller’s own family was deeply affected by the social and economic disasters of the Depression. “We suffered neither more nor less than most people,” he recalls. “My father (a coat manufacturer) managed to pull together a living. We still had a home to live in. But it was hard. It was to my generation what the Civil War had been to that other generation.”
There was a different kind of hard times in the ’50s, when anti-Communist campaigns against liberal, left-leaning artists reached deep into Miller’s life, adversely affecting the livelihoods of many colleagues with whom he had worked in the theater. “The Crucible,” which used the Salem witch hunts as a parallel to the Red-baiting of the ’50s, is one famous example. Another is “After the Fall,” a clearly autobiographical work that also deals with his failed marriage to Marilyn Monroe. “It was a painful play to write, yes, but then they all are, in a way. After a while, you get a certain distance, and you’re able to deal with it,” he says, closing the subject.
Miller’s playwriting career began when he attended the University of Michigan. Before that, he says, “I was into sports and fooling around. Nobody expected me to last more than two weeks in college.” But, surprising himself, he hung in there, working at two jobs to keep himself going and winning two important cash awards for his first student plays. (A Theatre Guild prize for young writers, in addition to singling out Miller, also went to another up-and-coming playwright, Tennessee Williams.)
The fact that he was a playwright first occurred to Miller when his early drama, “The Grass Still Grows,” was produced in Ann Arbor. He wrote it, licketysplit, in a five-day stretch. “But something in it,” he says, “seemed to resonate. Audiences liked it; they took to it.”
After graduation, he worked for a while in radio drama, but his theater career began in earnest in 1944, with “The Man Who Had All the Luck” (“not a realistic piece of boulevard theater”), which was a four-performance flop. Three years later, he had a resounding hit with “All My Sons.” “I wrote it quickly,” he remembers, “but I wrote it with the very clear decision that I was going to do a play every page of which worked.”
In 1949 came “Salesman,” the peak of his Broadway career and the cornerstone of his reputation as a great American playwright.
Then, and through most of the years that followed, Miller was a playwright who worked in the tradition of commercial theater; you opened a show out of town in New Haven or Baltimore and brought it directly into New York. But as Broadway declined as a fountainhead of new drama, so did Miller’s success quotient in Broadway theater. Latter-day works such as “Broken Glass” (1994) and “The Last Yankee” (1992) had only brief Broadway runs.
In London, where he became known as “England’s favorite American playwright,” he had better luck. Even an early, previously unproduced historic drama, about Cortez and Montezuma in Mexico, received a television production there; and “Broken Glass,” greeted with mixed reviews and slow box office on Broadway, won the Olivier Award (London’s Tony) as best new drama of its year. In England, says Matt Wolf, an American theater critic based in London, “There has been a constant level of respect and veneration, as opposed to the hot-and-cold periods of admiration Miller has had in the United States.”
Miller has an explanation for that. “It’s just that they have so much more theater than we do. And a lot of it is subsidized theater, which absolutely guarantees that a certain amount of plays will be produced.
“But here we are in New York, and right now there’s not a single new American play on Broadway. Think of it. The greatest city in the world, and we can’t support one new play in its great theater district. Oh, I know, they say there’s Off Broadway, but that’s a fallacy. You can’t make a living doing off-Broadway productions. It’s a theater for young people. If you write a play about mature people, you can’t cast it most of the time.
“On Broadway, meanwhile, it’s ridiculously expensive to produce a straight play. I’d like to know, where does the money go? It shouldn’t cost a million dollars to do a show with one set and four actors. It’s absurd.”
The success of the revival of “The Price,” however, has given Miller some hope. “You walk into the theater during a performance,” he says, “and you can hear a pin drop. There are no `stars’ in this production, just good actors, and people are leaning forward in their seats to hear what’s going on. They’re fascinated by the play.
“It shows that there is an audience waiting out there, waiting to see a good story.”
