Arthur Miller based 1947’s “All My Sons,” his first successful play, on a true story he heard: During World War II, a young woman informed on her father for defrauding the military on manufacturing contracts.
But when Miller wrote the play, the young woman became a young man because, as Miller noted in a 1999 BBC interview, “I didn’t know much about girls then.”
After the 89-year-old playwright’s death last month, most critics took note of his genius at creating tragic American Everyman Willy Loman in 1949’s “Death of a Salesman,” and his ability to anatomize the thorny relationship between fathers and sons.
The women in Miller’s plays, however, often are shunted to the margins, as many have noted. “Miller’s plays are essentially stories of men,” Martin Gottfried writes in his 2003 biography of Miller. British scholar Christopher Bigsby maintains, “Miller’s women are usually shadowy characters, rarely as fully realized as even some of the secondary men.”
When Miller’s women are considered, the discussion focuses almost exclusively on the long-suffering wife and mother, Linda Loman, in “Salesman,” and Maggie, the self-destructive stand-in for Miller’s second wife, Marilyn Monroe, in 1964’s “After the Fall.” Those looking for the great female roles in 20th Century American drama usually turn to Tennessee Williams’ characters, such as Blanche and Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
A closer look at Miller’s plays, however, reveals several multifaceted female characters, and one can make the case that he is perhaps the first great American playwright to draw realistic portraits of the marital state in all its joy and, more often, anguish.
Even a play as quintessentially political as 1953’s commentary on McCarthyism, “The Crucible,” contains a memorable marriage between deeply wounded but principled equals, the philandering John Proctor and his wife, Elizabeth, (a relationship movingly captured by Miller’s son-in-law, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Joan Allen in the 1996 film version that Miller himself adapted).
Caught in the net of the Salem witchcraft trials, the Proctors learn to forgive each other their failings, and in the process become tragic heroes.
“I think a lot of Miller’s female characters have deepened and become richer as we re-examine them in the post-feminist era,” says Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls, who won a Tony Award in 1999 for his revival of “Salesman,” as did Brian Dennehy and Elizabeth Franz as Willy and Linda.
Miller’s female characters “are very intelligent and very complicated women who are planets around the major sun, who is the male character.”
Falls’ and Franz’s version of Linda was a “much fiercer interpretation” than many had seen before, and Miller felt it was closer to his original conception of the character, Falls says.
Not weak or wimpy
Etel Billig, artistic director of Illinois Theatre Center in Park Forest, saw the 1949 premiere production of “Salesman” on Broadway with Mildred Dunnock as Linda.
“Dunnock was a frail and tiny actress,” Billig says. “So her delivery tended to reflect that, and I think a lot of directors since then followed that mold, just as they cast Willy as a big man because of Lee J. Cobb. If you look at the words Miller wrote for her, what Linda says isn’t weak or wimpy. She never feels sorry for herself.”
Miller often writes about tragically flawed men surrounded by women who represent reason and stability, says director Michael Menendian, artistic director of Raven Theatre in Chicago. “I think his plays suggest that he had more respect for women than for men,” he says. “The men are almost always fogged by their ambition or their vanity, and it’s the women who have to provide the clarity of vision.”
Menendian’s wife, actress JoAnn Montemurro, also notes that Miller’s female characters, like the men, are constrained by the society they live in.
“When I played Bea [Carbone] in `A View From the Bridge,’ it was immediately apparent that she is subservient to [husband] Eddie, but that’s true of the community, which is very conservative and traditional and working-class. She doesn’t have a lot of choices–she’s not just going to move out and get a job. But she eventually does confront Eddie with the truth” about the fact that he is attracted to their niece, Catherine. Eddie’s attraction to the niece leads to tragic consequences in the play.
Women are often the truth tellers in Miller’s plays, but even a character as seemingly deluded as Kate Keller in “All My Sons,” who believes her missing pilot son will show up some day, has a twisted kind of strength.
Insight within pain
“When [Chicago actress] Marilynn Bogetich played Kate for us, people were surprised by how strong the character is. Kate knows all along that her husband [Joe] is guilty [of shipping shoddy plane parts and covering it up]. She keeps it within as a way of getting back at Joe. She won’t confront him with his guilt as long as he keeps pretending that their son is coming back.”
Miller’s later plays do tend to feature women who are either struggling with mental illness (Patricia Hamilton in “The Last Yankee,” 1993) or a combination of physical and mental ills (Sylvia Gellburg in “Broken Glass,” 1994), but they retain insight even in the midst of their pain.
Michael Colucci artistic director of Chicago’s Actors Workshop Theatre, who has staged both plays, calls Sylvia “a marvel of uniquely inscrutable powers.”
Sylvia’s mental paralysis is brought on by seeing images of Kristallnacht, and serves as a metaphor for the world’s failure to save the European Jews. “She’s the one asking `Where is Roosevelt? Where is England?” Colucci says.
Actors Workshop Theatre will stage “All My Sons” and Miller’s 1991 dark comedy, “The Ride Down Mt. Morgan,” in the summer. The latter features a physically and morally damaged bigamist, Lyman Felt, who is laid up after a car accident, and whose two wives, Theo and Leah, have to decide whether they will stay with him.
“When push comes to shove, the women find the strength to do what is necessary,” Colucci says.
Billig notes that aside from the Maggie character in “After the Fall,” “there are no victims among Miller’s women. … It’s the men who commit suicide in his plays. The women are the survivors.”
The characters Linda Loman, Kate Keller and Elizabeth Proctor all get the last lines in the plays in which they appear.
“For all the flaws that the women have,” Falls says, “the men are equally flawed or more so. What interested Arthur Miller are the flaws in human beings and how they rise or fall in the face of larger social forces.”
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Female characters are studies in strength and resolve
1947: ALL MY SONS
Kate Keller, wife and mother who refuses to believe her son will not return from war.
“Don’t, dear. Don’t take it on yourself. Forget now. Live.”
1949: DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Linda Loman, conflicted, determined wife of salesman Willy Loman
“Willy, dear. I can’t cry. Why did you do it? I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy . . . . We’re free. We’re free . . . We’re free.”
1953: THE CRUCIBLE
Elizabeth Proctor, wife of farmer John who is accused of witchcraft by her husband’s former lover.
“He have [sic] his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him.”
1964: AFTER THE FALL
Maggie, troubled second wife of the main character, Quentin, a lawyer who defends unpopular causes.
“If I want something, you should ask yourself why, why does she want it, not why she shouldn’t have it . . . That’s why I don’t smile, I feel like I’m fighting all the time to make you see.”
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ctc-woman@tribune.com.
