Arthur Miller in Profile
From All My Sons, The Crucible, Finishing the Picture and Death of a Salesman to his last play Resurrection Blues.
Arthur Miller - 60 years of "just people on a stage talking to each other".
Arthur Miller is one of the most important playwrights - a giant in the history of American drama - "the playwright with calluses on his hands" said Michele Norris of National Public Radio program All Things Considered. Even after his death last year, his classic plays like All My Sons, The Crucible and especially the iconic Death of a Salesman continue to entertain, educate and encourage dialogue all over the world, even as his last two works are meeting new audiences.
Generations of audiences identify with so many Arthur Miller characters, from the self-less John Proctor in The Crucible to American dreamer Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
Like his vintage pieces, Miller's last two plays Resurrection Blues and Finishing the Picture continue to take mankind's moral temperature. One is universal; one Miller's own. With the dawning of a new millennium, the rich get richer and the poor get manipulated.
The temperature clearly hits fever pitch in Miller's Resurrection Blues - a scathing symphony of a Messiah-like figure sacrificed on the altar of crass commercialism and global politics, all set to the vacuous melody of today's media-saturated culture. It runs at London's Old Vic until April 22, 2006, under the direction of filmmaker Robert Altman.
Finishing the Picture is based on Marilyn Monroe's last film The Misfits, which then-husband Miller wrote for her. In the play, which premiered in the fall of 2004 at Chacago's Goodman Theatre, Miller writes of an idolized actress who suffers from substance abuse as her husband, film crew and acting coaches deal with her unpredictable behaviour on the set. (Miller also explored his marriage to Monroe through the tumultuous relationship of Quentin and Maggie in After the Fall.)
At age 36, Marilyn Monroe died tragically of a drug overdose. The world still mourns, as Miller himself did, and his final play seems a kinder, gentler, closure.
Miller lived from 1915 to February 10, 2005. For six decades, he dug soul-deep into the American psyche, probing societal erosion from the Depression in Salesman and McCarthyism in The Crucible, to rampant commercialism in Resurrection Blues and the personal price of celebrity in Finishing the Picture. Miller's characters feel joy and tragedy in Shakespearean proportions and stemming from fateful, very human decisions they make.
Suppose Mary Warren hadn't lied to John Proctor in The Crucible; or Willy Loman had accepted a job from friend Charlie in Death of a Salesman. What if Joe Keller hadn't agreed to sell faulty plane parts in All My Sons, or if Paul had given his marriage to Kitty another chance in Finishing the Picture? The outcome would have been so different.
This is what makes Arthur Miller so powerful and timeless in his work. Mankind lives by its decisions. Luckily, Miller will forever be asking his audience: Can you live by yours?
