At 100, Arthur Miller’s legacy endures..............................................
Playwright shined a light on struggles of common characters
No writer has probed this country’s moral conscience more forcefully or relentlessly than Arthur Miller, who would have turned 100 on Saturday. With plays such as Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible and A View From the Bridge, Miller cast an unsparing light on issues troubling our national soul, while ennobling the men and women who struggled with them, however imperfectly.
His characters “were often fractured, but they were still men of ideals,” says another Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Lynn Nottage ( Ruined), who wrote the foreword to The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, released this week. Adds Michael Wilson, who is directing an off-Broadway production of Miller’s Incident at Vichy this fall, “He took classic tragedy and transmuted it to the common man, making it democratic and accessible and essential for all of us.”
Salesman and Sons, in particular, Miller showed how capitalism, a system ostensibly designed to promote the individual, could crush those it promised to empower.
Born into a Jewish family that prospered before being financially devastated by the stock-market crash that precipitated the Great Depression, Miller, who died in 2005 at age 89, “was aware of inequity in ways that people who hadn’t experienced it first-hand couldn’t be,” Nottage notes.
Miller also defended the right to personal and creative expression, at his own peril. While the House Un-American Activities Committee was investigating art- ists and writers under suspicion of Communist activity in the 1940s, Miller not only refused to name names but engaged in social protest through his writing.
Miller’s accounts of the search for integrity and justice were not intended for American audiences only. Vichy examines the anti- Semitism that led to Nazi genocide. And the emotional and moral quandaries faced in his plays have universal resonance, from View to After the Fall — informed by Miller’s much-examined marriage to Marilyn Monroe — to later works such as The Ride Down St. Morgan (1991) and Resurrection Blues (2002).
Julia Bolus, who was Miller’s assistant and is director of the Arthur Miller Trust, notes that his plays are still translated, published and performed in new languages and different countries each year. Which would have suited him: “He lived in a way that was very connected to the world.”