Playwright Arthur Miller

In the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Profoundly influenced by the Depression and the war that immediately followed it, Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche. His probing dramas proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times, allowing people an honest view of the direction the country had taken.

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan in 1915 to Jewish immigrant parents. By 1928, the family had moved to Brooklyn, after their garment manufacturing business began to fail. Witnessing the societal decay of the Depression and his father’s desperation due to business failures had an enormous effect on Miller. After graduating from high school, Miller worked a number of jobs and saved up the money for college. In 1934, he enrolled in the University of Michigan and spent much of the next four years learning to write and working on a number of well-received plays.

To read the full article, click HERE.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/arthur-miller-none-without-sin/56/

By Claudia Adrien, March 3, 2017

The Cold War was an era clouded by persistent paranoia, not only between the United States and the Soviet Union. When it came to its own citizens, the U.S. government was, in some cases, just as fearful as it was about foreign threats—especially when it came to the Hollywood crowd. Indeed, in October 1947, members of a congressional committee, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), began investigating members of the movie industry who they suspected were communist sympathizers. They banned the work of 325 screenwriters, actors, and directors*. Among those blacklisted were composer Aaron Copland, writers Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, and Dorothy Parker, playwright Arthur Miller, and actor and filmmaker Orson Welles.

The Creative Environment During the Cold War

The term McCarthyism came out of this period and is now used more broadly to describe unfounded accusations of one group or political party against its opponent, particularly in discussions of patriotism and integrity.

In the 1950s, anyone suspected of communist sympathies was thoroughly investigated with no mind paid for the personal damage such an investigation may have caused. During this time, there were few in the press willing to stand up against Senator Joseph McCarthy and the anti-Communist hunt he led.

In 1950, ten individuals, known as the Hollywood Ten, defied HUAC and refused to cooperate with the investigation. They cited the actions of the committee as a violation of their civil liberties, as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution afforded them the right to belong to any political organization. The men were sentenced to a year in jail, although one of the Hollywood Ten, Edward Dmytryk, decided to cooperate with the government and provided the names of more than 20 in Hollywood he alleged were communists**.

Arthur Miller's Response

In response to this period of intimidation, playwright Arthur Miller penned some of his most notable works, including The Crucible (1953), an interpretation of the events that occurred in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, where twenty innocent people were executed for witchcraft.

The way in which Miller paralleled the witch trials with the era of McCarthyism earned him a seat in front of HUAC. He was convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to name names of communist sympathizers; however, his conviction was later overturned. Nevertheless, the experience continued to impact the playwright and his later works.

To read the full article, click HERE.

https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/mccarthyism-and-arthur-miller

MILLER LINKS

Here we provide annotated links to sites that are related to Arthur Miller and his work (also check out the teaching guides section at the top of our works page that offers several links not referenced here that lend themselves specifically to teaching several of the plays). Please write in if you know of anything useful that we might add (please no sales sites).  I try and keep these up to date, so do let me know if a link is not working or if you know to where something has been moved: e-mail  Sue Abbotson.

Westport Playhouse put together this great Introduction to Miller short film; the first 11 minutes gives a brief background interspersed by comments from several leading scholars, then the last 7 minutes talks specifically about Broken Glass. Access on You Tube or through the Westport Playhouse website.

POD CAST on Miller’s Centennial broadcast on BBC Radio 5  from the Janice Forsyth Show (18 minutes); talking to the Rapture Theatre Director Michael Emans, about their two touring Miller productions this year, All My Sons and The Last Yankee, and to leading Miller scholar, Chris Bigsby. Includes a clip of Miller talking about All My Sons.

The Hook: a YouTube video created to advertize the production and various productions stills from the 2015 production.

Overview of UK television productions of Death of a Salesman (1957, 1966 and 1996) by Amanda Wrigley.

The Guardian offers a small gallery of stills from past productions of Death of a Salesman.

Audio Recordings Check out the L. A. Theater Works catalog to order audio tapes or CDs of various Miller plays; now available in digital format.  They currently have The Crucible,Death Of A Salesman, A View From The Bridge, All My Sons, The Price, Incident At Vichy, The Man Who Had All the Luck, After The Fall, The Ride down Mount Morgan and Broken Glass and keep adding to the list. These are excellent resources with big name actors in the casts, so check them out at their website.

Teatro Vista video series on You Tube with actors taking part in their 2014 "All Latino" production of A View from the Bridge, talking about their conception of the roles: Eddie, Beatrice, Alfieri, Rodolpho, Marco, Catherine, and the Director (Ricardo Gutierrez).

View reviews and details of the 1995 Colony Theatre production of Incident at Vichy.

View photographs of the Russian production of The Price (Tsena), that opened in November 2012 and continues to play on select dates.

Concert In Athens, the tenth ECM release by Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, incorporates moving performances by guests violist Kim Kashkashian, oboist Vangelis Christopoulos, and saxophonist Jan Garbarek. A primary emphasis is music written for theatre: including pieces for plays by Arthur Miller ("Requiem for Willy Loman"), Tennesee Williams and Edward Albee. Recorded November 2010.

Link to NY Post where David Amram tells about meeting with Miller to compose the music for After the Fall.  Also a link to a YouTube page that has four versions of David Amram performing "Waltz in D Minor," the music that he composed for After the Fall.

“It was at Igor and Sonia Sudarsky’s classic neighborhood delicatessen that I worked with Arthur Miller composing the music for his play ‘After the Fall.’ Miller loved Greenwich Village, and the Art was where anybody and everyone would go — there were no A tables, and Igor would make you a gigantic sandwich. He used to let me make my own behind the counter. Dustin Hoffman lived right around the corner, and after he did ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ he still went to the deli because Igor was so nice to him. Whenever he had an interview, he’d take them there, so Igor would have more customers.”

CBC interview with Arthur Miller soon after he published In Russia. He talks about the oppression he sees in all political systems, how he survived HUAC, and his love of America.

A short British documentary recently loaded to Youtube that covers Miller’s years with Marilyn Monroe. Includes interviews with Miller, in which he talks, fairly candidly, about his relationship. There are two parts--totalling around fifteen minutes. Part one. Part two.

UKs Guardian offers a series of photographs of Miller and Monroe during their marriage.

Christopher Bigsby dicusses Miller's reputation in America in this Guardian article.

Clip on YouTube has an excerpt of Miller on 60 Minutes in 1999 during which he reflects on Marilyn Monroe. The video showing the whole show has been removed.

Another British documentary on the Miller/Monroe match from YouTube.

Digital Theatre: 2010 Apollo Theatre’s West End production All My Sons will soon be available as a downloadable productions (or to stream) from £6.99 at the Digital Theatre website. Directed by Howard Davies and designed by William Dudley, with David Suchet as Joe Keller, Zoe Wanamaker as Kate Keller, Stephen Campbell Moore as Chris, and Jemima Rooper as Ann Deever.

Arthur Miller Trust. Only limited information, but this is from the official trust so should have up to date contact info. for performance rights and Miller's literary agent, as well as a brief bio., list of works, some major performances.

Focus. Here you can view the 1962 NBC television version of Miller's 1945 book, Focus, with James Whitmore and Colleen Dewhurst. Miller did not write this strangely mangled production--but an interesting adaptation nonetheless. It certainly makes the 2001 movie version seem almost faithful, despite its altered ending.

Old Time radio: You can listen to Orson Welles in Miller’s radio drama Thunder from the Hills. A thirty minute treat in which Welles appears to be reading all the parts.

Links and lessons.  A fairly comprehensive selection of other links here to sites that have Miller biography, and specific materials on Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons, and A View from the Bridge—many of these contain useful lesson plan material—especially the All My Sons study guide for GCSE level (that would be grade 8-10 in the US).  I'm putting a link to this one on our lesson plans page too. They keep adding, and now have a separate page for all of the material they have gathered on The Crucible.

Miller Archives:  University of Delaware library Special Collections Department.  Richard Hoffman-Brooklyn theater collector and bookdealer, built the Arthur Miller Collection over a period of fifty years.  Contains play scripts, screenplays, photographs, correspondence, financial documents, posters, flyers, periodicals, journals, theatre programs, news clippings, and ephemera. The collection is open for research, and you can check out a list of their holdings on-line.

"The Death of Arthur Miller," where you can hear a song written to commemorate Miller's passing.

NPR's On Point: Death of a Playwright, aired the evening following Miller's death on Feb. 11th 2005.  Harold Bloom, Marsha Norman, Jack Beattie and Sue Abbotson discusss Miller's legacy. Type in Arthur Miller to the search box when you link to the page to get to the interview.

A link to the BBC archives where one can hear the writer's voice when he was around 26 years of age. 

General Info  Charles A. Carpenter has put together an excellent resource here which gives you a descriptive chronology of Miller's plays, theatrical career, and dramatic theories , and good starter bibliographies for both primary and secondary sources.  Elsewhere, the site also offers an historic overview of Western theater which allows you see where Miller comes in that timeline and development.

Death of a Salesman This is the Eugene O'Neill Theater's site that offers a wealth of material about Death of a Salesman to go with their 1999 production of the play. Along with information on the O'Neill production, with biographies of the cast and creative team, you can access reviews of this production and key past productions, a variety of information on Miller, and study guide materials. You can even order tickets and souvenirs. On Miller they offer a fairly detailed chronology, brief bio. and biblio. of major critical works, and the script of Matthew Roudané's 1985 interview with the playwright. Under "study guide" you can access fairly lengthy excerpts of various books and articles relating to Death of a Salesman by Miller and other scholars. Study guides for students and teachers, and transcripts of on-line chats with Miller and Brian Dennehy. All told, one of the most useful sites on Miller currently on the web.

Salesman Concordances  SADLY NO LONGER WORKS--if you know where this can be accessed again, please let us know. Did you know the name Willy is spoken 128 times in the play, but Linda only 22?  This is a database with all of the acting dialogue (N.B.  none of the stage directions etc.) from Death of a Salesman in a full concordance format in which every wors is indexed and connected to its textual context. You can see alphabetical word lists, frequency of words, and the text of the acting dialogue.  A little confusing at first to navigate, but an interesting research tool once you get the hang of it..

General Miller Info.    This site offers a very brief five-paragraph biography by Malcolm Goldstein. A very basic introduction--doesn't even mention half the plays and is especially sketchy on recent years. The bibliography lists the obvious, and less than half of the links actually work. Of those that do, the most useful is the one to the Internet Movie Database http://us.imdb.com/, which gives production details of a number of TV and film projects at home and abroad, along with some fun trivia. Others include audio files of clips from The Crucible, a review of a 1995 theater production of The Crucible, a sketchy interview that appeared on Mr. Showbiz, and a 1988 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein on Kazan and Miller.

Curtain Up. Curtain Up offers an interesting site which is easy to navigate.  It gives some basic background to Miller, but, most importantly, a whole collection of reviews of recent productions of Miller's plays in New York and Williamstown, MA and they keep adding.  A useful study tool.

The Crucible  Historian Margo Burns tries to separate the fact from the fiction in Miller's play, pointing out historical details which differ from Miller's artistic recreation of events.  This is part of an historical site with an interest in 17th century colonist New England.  Burns lists historical inaccuracies in The Crucible, and points to resources where these details can be confirmed.  She ends by asking some interesting questions regarding how inaccurate historical recreations (often created in the name of art) might impact the historical awareness of the reader/viewer.

Basic background on Miller and his best known works from the UK, aimed at Secondary/High School students.

Reference Guide.  Offers links to pages on Miller and Kazan, America in the 1950s, and the Arthur Miller edition of American Drama (see above).  Also a brief list of main primary works (up to 1994), and a very selected bibliography, with separate sections on Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.  There is a brief comparison of Willy Loman and John Proctor by Robert Hogan, and a couple of study questions.  Maybe useful as a first step for high schoolers.

Arthur Miller testifies before HUAC, June 21, 1956

On this day in 1956, playwright Arthur Miller testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his political leanings but refused to name others who had joined him in his pro-Communist undertakings.

The committee had subpoenaed Miller after he sought to renew his passport. Miller planned to go to London with movie star Marilyn Monroe, whom he married four days after appearing before the panel. The newlyweds were then to travel to Brussels, Belgium, for the opening of Miller’s new play, “The Crucible,” which dissected the 1692 witch hunt trials in Salem, Mass.

Rep. Francis Walter (D-Pa.), the committee’s chairman, promised Miller that he wouldn’t be asked to name names but broke his word. With Monroe by his side, Miller told Walter: “I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.”

Miller readily conceded the committee’s right to inquire into his own political activities. However, unlike most other uncooperative witnesses, he did not invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination but rather cited the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and, by implication, the right to remain silent.

Asked why the Communist Party had produced one of his plays, he said, “I take no more responsibility for who plays my plays than General Motors can take for who rides in their Chevrolets.” Asked about his brief flirtation with Communism, he said, “I have had to go to hell to meet the devil,” after which one wag quipped that he must have gone there as a tourist.

In 1957, Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress, denied a passport and sentenced to a $500 fine or 30 days in jail. But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction, ruling that Walter had misled him.

Miller and Monroe were divorced in 1961. Miller died in 2005 at age 89.

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/this-day-in-politics-093127

From the Arthur Miller Society website:

1915 Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17th in New York City; family lives at 45 West 110th Street.

1920-28 Attends Public School #24 in Harlem.

1923  Sees first play--a melodrama at the Schubert Theater.

1928  Bar-mitzvah at the Avenue M temple.   Father's business struggling and family move to Brooklyn.  Attends James Madison High School.

1930  Reassigned to the newly built Abraham Lincoln High School.  Plays on football team.

1931  Delivery boy for local bakery before school, and works for father's business over summer vacation.

1932  Graduates from Abraham Lincoln High School. Registers for night school at City College, but quits after two weeks.

1933-34  Clerked in an auto-parts warehouse, where he was the only Jew employed and had his first real, personal experiences of American anti-semitism.

1934  Enters University of Michigan in the Fall to study journalism. Reporter and night editor on student paper, The Michigan Daily.

1936 Writes No Villain in six days and receives Hopwood Award in Drama. Transfers to an English major.

1937 Takes playwrighting class with Professor Kenneth T. Rowe. Rewrite of No Villain, titled, They Too Arise, receives a major award from the Bureau of New Plays and is produced in Ann Arbor and Detroit. Honors at Dawn receives Hopwood Award in Drama. Drives Ralph Neaphus East to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain during their Civil War, and decides not to go with him.

1938 The Great Disobedience receives second place in the Hopwood contest. They Too Arise is revised and titled The Grass Still Grows for anticipated production in New York City (never materializes). Graduates with a B.A. in English.  Joins the Federal Theater Project in New York City to write radio plays and scripts, having turned down a much better paying offer to work as a scriptwriter for Twentieth Century Fox, in Hollywood.

1939 Writes Listen My Children, and You're Next with Norman Rosten.  Federal Theater is shut down and has to go on relief.  William Ireland's Confession airs on Colimbia Workshop.

1940 Travels to North Carolina to collect dialect speech for the folk division of the Library of Congress.  Marries Mary Grace Slattery. Writes The Golden Years. Meets Clifford Odets in a second-hand bookstore.   The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man, a radio play airs on Columbia Workshop (CBS)

1941 Takes extra job working nightshift as a shipfitter's helper at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Writes other radio plays, Joel Chandler Harris, and Captain Paul.

1942 Writes radio plays The Battle of the Ovens, Thunder fron the Mountains, I Was Married in Bataan, Toward a Farther Star, The Eagle's Nest, and The Four Freedoms.

1943 Writes The Half-Bridge, and one-act, That They May Win, produced in New York City. Writes Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play).

1944 Daughter, Jane, is born. Writes radio plays Bernadine, I Love You, Grandpa and t he Statue, and The Phillipines Never Surrendered. Adapts Ferenc Molnar's The Guardsman and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for the radio. Having toured army camps to research for The Story of G.I. Joe (a film for which he wrote the initial draft screenplay, but later withdrew from project when he saw they would not let him write it his way), he publishes book about experience, Situation Normal. The Man Who Had All The Luck premiers on Broadway but closes after six performances (including 2 previews), though receives the Theater Guild National Award.

1945 Focus (novel) published. Writes Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play). Writes "Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?" for New Masses (article).

1946 Adapts George Abbott's and John C. Holm's Three Men on a Horse for radio.

1947 All My Sons premiers and receives the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award. Son, Robert, is born. Writes The Story of Gus (radio play). Writes "Subsidized Theatre" for The New York Times (article). Goes to work for a short time in an inner city factory assembling beer boxes for minimum wage to stay in touch with his audience. Gives first interview to John K. Hutchens, for The New York Times. Explores the Red Hook area and tries to get into the world of the longshoremen there, and find out about Pete Panto, whose story would form the nucleus of his screenplay The Hook.  Buys farmhouse in Roxbury Connecticut as a vacation home, and 31 Grace Court in the city.

1948 Built himself the small Connecticut studio in which he wrote Death of a Salesman. Trip to Europe with Vinny Longhi where got sense of the Italian background he would use for the Carbones and their relatives, also met some Jewish deathcamp survivors held captive in a post-war tangle of bureaucracy.

1949 Death of a Salesman premiers and receives the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, and the Theater Club Award, among others. New York Times publishes "Tragedy and the Common Man" (essay). Attends the pro-Soviet Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to chair an arts panel with Odets and Dmitri Shostakovich.

To see more milestones in Arthur Miller's life, click HERE.