Attention Must Be Paid
Published February 11, 2005
To me the theater is not a disconnected entertainment, which it usually is to most people here. It's the sound and the ring of the spirit of the people at any one time. It is where a collective mass of people, through the genius of some author, is able to project its terrors and its hopes and to symbolize them. ... I personally feel that the theater has to confront the basic themes always. And the faces change from generation to generation to generation, but their roots are generally the same, and that is a question of man's increasing awareness of himself and his environment, his quest for justice and for the right to be human. That's a big order, but I don't know where else excepting at a playhouse where there's reasonable freedom, one should hope to see that. — Arthur Miller, from a speech delivered at the University of Michigan, Feb. 28, 1967
From the UK's Independent:
[Miller] will be remembered above all for his plays, several of which have entered the canon of world literature. There was The Crucible, written in 1953 and part of the curriculum of every American school student. He based it on the 1692 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, but it is an allegory for the hysteria and unjust persecutions of the McCarthyite hunt for communists of the period.In his 1967 play The Price, Miller told the desperately painful story of a fortune lost and roads not taken, as two estranged brothers have to dispose of the sorry remnants of their father's estate.
Earlier, there was A View from the Bridge, a tale of intrigue and betrayal in an immigrant Brooklyn family, which drew heavily on Greek tragedy.
Above all of course, there is Death of a Salesman, Miller's most famous work, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949 at the age of 33. It captures the central strand of his drama — how ordinary families can be swept up and destroyed by social changes they are powerless to combat. "Dislocation, maybe, is part of our uneasiness. It implants the feeling that nothing is really permanent," Miller once said of his work.
No, nothing is permanent. Arthur Miller is gone. With any luck, he has joined Eugene O'Neill and Lorraine Hansberry and Tennessee Williams and all in the literary great beyond. How fortunate we are that, for a time, one of the most humane and humanistic writers actually lived and breathed in our midst. Thank the goddess: Despite Miller's impermanence, his work lives on.
Natalie Davis is an award-winning journalist, progressive- and GLBT-issues activist, musician and broadcaster. Davis' All Facts and Opinions - The Armchair Activist has existed since 1996. She is general manager and program/music director of Grateful Dread Radio, an 11-year-old multigenre Internet station dedicated to presenting diverse sounds for open minds.- Attention Must Be Paid
- Published: February 11, 2005
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- Writer: Natalie Davis
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Thanks, Eric.
I think the least interesting thing about Miller was his celebrity -- the public reaction to his marriage to Monroe and all. That aspect of his life merited the least amount of legitimate attention. Somehow I suspect he would have agreed.
oh I agree too, just saying he transcended his specific field into the great culture, which relatively few playwrights do
Indeed, because the "great culture" sin't all that great. Miller was so great he simply could not be ignored.
Thanks again, Natalie.
Death of a Salesman affected me deeply back in high school. A truly inspired artist.
Arthur Miller was one of the three greatest playwrights of the 20th Century. Death of a Salesman has played a vital role in my reading life, and for all its problems, I still have this sense that The Misfits is a great film, or that maybe it has greatness in it, greatness lost perhaps.
But I would hardly call his marriage to Marilyn Monroe the least interesting thing about his life -- how could it be? She's Marilyn Monroe! And Miller certainly didn't think it was uninteresting; he got one of his most famous plays, After the Fall, out of it.
the greatness of Death of a Salesman, in which I appeared in college, is that it never loses its visceral power no matter how well you know it
Death of a Salesman is also a weirdly un-Jewish Jewish play. When I read it in high school -- and I all but memorized it -- I never once thought it was about a Jewish family. There was no indication they were Jewish at all: no Yiddishisms, no Star of David, no Holocaust references. I thought they were middle-of-the-road Protestants!
Years later, after the Dustin Hoffman version was on TV, a Jewish friend said to me "I don't see how anyone can understand that play who isn't Jewish." I was completely baffled. Had I been misreading the cultural context of the play all these years? Why was it I never read, or don't remember reading, any commentary about its Jewishness?
I'd sometimes ask people if they saw it as a play with any religious association at all. You know what they'd say? "Well, Arthur Miller's Jewish" -- therefore, it had to be a Jewish play eventhough there was zero about the play to make you think so.
I thought I was alone in thinking all this through the years until I stumbled on Karen Hartman's recent Nextbook essay "Going, Gone."
The play's Judaism, like that of its characters, lies in its not being anything else--not rooted New England, not a sweetly rotting South. Details have been erased, leaving a sparse, attenuated world that is universal and also incomplete.
I would hope that Miller wouldn't think his marriage to Monroe uninteresting. My mileage varies. Now, the Judaism point -- *that's* interesting. Of course, I find the notion that only Jews could understand the play fully ludicrous and insulting.
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thanks Nat, they don't get much bigger from a literary and celebrity standpoint, especially in the '50s and '60s - great title too!