E-Mail This Article to a Friend Arthur Miller 1915–2005 BY STEVE VINEBERG

Arthur Miller, who died last Thursday, had a remarkably fulfilled life by anyone’s definition. He won acclaim with his second professionally produced play, All My Sons, in 1945. It was already a movie by the time he returned to Broadway four years later, just 33, with Death of a Salesman, which won the Pulitzer, the Tony, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards. Neither those plays nor his 1953 The Crucible has ever gone out of the repertory. Salesman, one of the three most passionately revered American plays (the others are A Streetcar Named Desire and Long Day’s Journey into Night), receives a major production every 15 or 20 years. In 1966, Miller produced a superb TV version with the original stars, Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock (who were much closer to the right age for the characters when they returned to them), and it was so successful, it sparked a brief revival of the Broadway-to-the-small-screen craze of the ’50s. (Among the beneficiaries was The Crucible, televised with a spectacular cast headed by George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Melvyn Douglas, and Tuesday Weld.) Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich starred in a beautifully calibrated Broadway production in 1984; a miscast Brian Dennehy appeared in an overblown one five years ago that nonetheless received laudatory notices. Both were filmed for TV, and that made Salesman the only American play besides Our Town to reach television audiences on three separate occasions.

In addition to his voluminous writings — which include critical essays, memoirs, screenplays, and translations — Miller was a culture hero who spoke out against the House Un-American Activities Committee and married an icon from a different part of the American show-business spectrum, Marilyn Monroe. Their marriage was a mismatch that ended in disaster: they divorced in 1961, the year the movie he wrote for her, The Misfits, premiered, and she was dead of an overdose a year later. But their attempt to bridge the gap between Hollywood pop culture and serious theater, not to mention the sexual union of a bespectacled Jewish egghead and the most desirable carnal goddess in movies, made a fascinating chapter in the history of the divided ’50s.

Even if you have mixed feelings about Miller as a playwright — which I admit to — you have to hand it to the guy: he did it all. He lived to a ripe old age (89), and he never stopped churning out plays (his last, Finishing the Picture, opened at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago last fall) or giving interviews whenever one of his old ones reappeared on the boards, like After the Fall a couple of years ago. He set the terms, not only with Salesman but with the essays he wrote about it, for the discussion of the viability of American tragedy. And whether or not you accept those terms, it’s been impossible for more than half a century now to talk about the issue without invoking Miller and his "tragedy of the small man."

What is it about his plays that is so compelling that they’re continually remounted? It isn’t their intellectual substance, though Miller consistently presented himself as a playwright of ideas. Salesman is generally read as a scathing indictment of the American Dream, but though the play is certainly furious over something, the target of Miller’s anger keeps shifting — is it the false dreams of the protagonist, Willy Loman, or Willy himself for believing in them? As a portrait of a hapless bastard done in by the commercial expectations American society has of all "low men," it’s curiously unsympathetic, partly because it lacks an anagnorisis, that moment of recognition that redeems tragic heroes from King Lear to Uncle Vanya. (Even Beckett’s Vladimir has one.) Miller intended The Crucible, which is about the Salem witch hunts, as a parable for the McCarthy era, and that’s how it’s universally interpreted, but the closer you get to the text, the wider the discrepancy grows between the dramatic situation and the political one it’s meant to symbolize. I couldn’t tell you what the rambling, autobiographical After the Fall is about; it seems to be some generalized treatise on guilt, but Miller is so protective toward his hero, Quentin, that the play winds up saying he has nothing to be guilty about. And his social-problem drama All My Sons melts down to the kind of statement no one could quarrel with: when the manufacturer of airplane cylinders during World War II delivers defective ones and a plane crashes as a result, it’s time to place morality above commerce.

And Miller’s gift certainly isn’t for language. Unlike O’Neill’s dialogue, which is powerful, or Williams’s, which is poetic, his is merely insistent. The lines we recall from his plays — "Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person," "He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him," "I guess, for him, they were all his sons" — are banal in sentiment and often tortured in syntax.

What he knew how to do was write for actors. Probably he learned a great deal in that regard from his association with Elia Kazan, who directed All My Sons, Salesman, and, much later (after their different responses before HUAC had broken up their friendship and they were finally reconciled once more), After the Fall, which was the opening production at Lincoln Center in 1961. But what has always stirred actors about his plays is his talent for dramatizing emotion and complex, unresolvable relationships. Think of the opening scene in act two of The Crucible, its psychology beautifully worked out, where the hero, John Proctor, tries to win back the trust of his wife, Elizabeth, whom he’s cheated on with a local teenage girl, while her inclination to forgive him struggles with her essentially repressed and judgmental nature. And Miller is famously insightful about the thorny negotiations between fathers and sons. That’s what gets audiences about Death of a Salesman, I think, not the overstated and still unconvincing American Dream scenario, and it’s at the heart of All My Sons, too. This early entry in the Miller œuvre is my personal favorite of his plays, undoubtedly because I saw the devastating production Jack O’Brien directed for TV in 1987, with James Whitmore as the industrialist who sold those cylinders and got away with it (his far less clever partner took the rap and went to jail) and Aidan Quinn as his idealistic son, who idolizes his father out of reason and, when he discovers the truth, turns on him. The script may seem to tell us that when Joe Keller marches into the house at the end of act three and blasts his head off with a revolver, he’s administering justice, but the sight of Quinn’s Chris howling with grief and with the realization that his unrelenting moralism has actually killed the person he loves most in the world makes it clear that if there’s only one side to the moral issue of the play, there are two sides to the characterological one.

Marilyn Monroe was one issue Miller could never resolve for himself. She keeps returning to haunt his work — not only as Roslyn, the role he wrote for her in The Misfits, but also as Maggie in After the Fall and apparently in his final work, Finishing the Picture. But I think he got her better than anyone ever has in perhaps the least known dramatic text he ever wrote, his witty, surprising screenplay for Karel Reisz’s 1990 film noir Everybody Wins. In this marvelous little picture, Nick Nolte plays a private eye, Tom O’Toole, with a reputation for being something of a crusader who’s brought in to solve a murder in a small New England town and prove the innocence of the kid who’s been convicted of it. The movie’s femme fatale is Angela Crespini (Debra Winger), who seduces Tom into taking the job and who turns out to be involved in some way with everyone he interviews. Angela suffers from multiple-personality disorder — "I, like, break up" is her explanation for her increasingly bizarre behavior — and each of her personalities is like a shard of glass reflecting some aspect of Monroe as Miller must have experienced her: the earnest, flirtatious admirer (that’s the one who draws Tom into the case, of course); the pretentious aspiring intellectual; and the lost child wandering through the streets with a wayward focus, adrift from the life around her. Winger captures the split Monroe in a way that makes it clear why no one could ever put her together. It’s a great performance, in what I’m tempted to call the greatest part Arthur Miller ever wrote.