[nasional_list] [ppiindia] Arthur Miller dies at 89; American playwright
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- Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 01:31:09 +0100
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Arthur Miller dies at 89; American playwright
By Marilyn Berger The New York Times Saturday, February 12, 2005
Arthur Miller, one of the great contemporary playwrights, whose work exposed
the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his home
in Roxbury, Connecticut. He was 89.
.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Julia Bolus, his assistant.
.
The author of "Death of a Salesman," a landmark of 20th-century drama, Miller
grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays.
.
They often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of
his own life, including a brief and rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his
staunch refusal to cooperate with the red-baiting House Committee on
Un-American Activities.
.
"Death of a Salesman," which opened on Broadway in 1949, established Miller as
a giant of the theater when he was only 33.
.
It won the triple crown of theatrical artistry that year: the Pulitzer Prize,
the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony Award.
.
But the play's enormous success also overshadowed Miller's long career.
.
Although "The Crucible," a 1953 play about the Salem witch trials inspired by
his virulent hatred of McCarthyism, and "A View From the Bridge," a 1955 drama
of obsession and betrayal, would ultimately take their place as popular
classics of the international stage, Miller's later plays never equaled his
early successes.
.
Although Miller wrote a total of 17 plays, "The Price," produced on Broadway
during the 1967-68 season, was the playwright's last solid critical and
commercial hit.
.
Nevertheless, Miller wrote successfully in a wide variety of other media.
.
Perhaps most notably, he supplied the screenplay for "The Misfits," a 1961
movie directed by John Huston and starring Monroe, to whom he was married at
the time. He also wrote essays, short stories and a 1987 autobiography,
"Timebends: A Life."
.
His writing remained politically engaged until the end of his life. He was an
outspoken critic of President George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq.
.
But Miller's reputation rests on a handful of his best-known plays, the dramas
of guilt and betrayal and redemption that continue to be revived frequently at
theaters all over the world. These dramas of social conscience were drawn from
life and informed by the Great Depression, the event that he believed had had a
more profound impact on the nation than any other in American history, except
possibly the Civil War.
.
"In play after play," the drama critic Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times,
"he holds man responsible for his and for his neighbor's actions."
.
The Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who worked frequently with Miller,
found a "rabbinical righteousness" in the playwright.
.
Miller once said that writing plays was for him like breathing. He wrote in
"Timebends" that when he was young, he "imagined that with the possible
exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most
important thing a human being could do."
.
He also saw playwriting as a way to change America, and, as he put it, "that
meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck."
.
Miller was born on West 110th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 17, 1915, to Augusta
and Isidore Miller. His father was a coat manufacturer, and so prosperous that
he rode in a chauffeur-driven car from the family apartment overlooking the
northern edge of Central Park to the Seventh Avenue garment district.
.
The Depression changed everything for the family, and it became a theme that
etched its way through Arthur Miller's plays, from "Death of a Salesman" to
"The Price" and "After the Fall," from "The American Clock" to "A Memory of Two
Mondays." The crash meant the collapse of the coat business and a move from the
apartment overlooking the park to reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section
of Brooklyn.
.
Acclaimed as a modern American masterpiece in its first reviews and translated
into 29 languages, "Salesman" was no sooner a success on Broadway than it was
savaged in the intellectual journals as sentimental melodrama or Marxist
propaganda.
.
In 1956, Miller was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. He was applauded in Hollywood and in New York theater circles when
he refused to name names, a courageous act in an atmosphere of palpable fear.
He was cited for contempt of Congress, although he said he had never joined the
Communist Party.
.
In 1956, even as Miller's testimony had continued, he and Monroe were married,
a union that Norman Mailer sourly remarked brought together "the Great American
Brain" and "the Great American Body."
.
For most of the four years of that marriage, Miller wrote almost nothing except
"The Misfits."
.
The film would premiere early 1961, shortly after the couple's marriage ended
in divorce.
.
A year later, Miller would remarry, and six months after that, Monroe would be
found dead, a suicide, at her house in Los Angeles.
.
In a biography of Monroe, Maurice Zolotow wrote that Miller had "to give up his
entire time to attend to her wants."
.
He was once asked if he had resented having to care for her to the detriment of
his work.
.
"Oh, yeah," he answered.
.
"After the Fall," his most overtly autobiographical play, brought Miller a
storm of criticism when it was produced in 1964, shortly after Monroe's death.
.
After his autobiography was published in 1987, he reflected in an interview on
the course he had taken in life. "It has gone through my mind how much time I
wasted in the theater, if only because when you write a book you pack it up and
send it off," he said.
.
"In the theater, you spend months casting actors who are busy in the movies
anyway and then to get struck down in half an hour, as has happened to me more
than once.
.
"You have to say to yourself: 'Why do it? It's almost insulting."'
.
But when asked how he wanted to be remembered, he did not hesitate. "I hope as
a playwright," he said. "That would be all of it."
.
.
.
Charles Isherwood and Jesse McKinley contributed reporting for this article.
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