Playwright Miller dazzles, charms

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Arthur Miller offered insight into his work and life.

As iconic American playwright Arthur Miller ages, he becomes more and more like his own protagonist from Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman. Certainly he is liked. Security guards at the Yale University Art Gallery yesterday had to turn away about 300 people from a question-and-answer session with Miller; lines started forming an hour before the 5 p.m. interview.

"You know, at home I'm known as `The Joker," he told admirers and curious initiates on Wed., Nov. 18, at the ninth Maynard Mack Lecture, organized by the Elizabethan Club. "If you stand at the back of one of my plays, you'd be surprised at how many people are laughing," he said. "They laugh a lot in Death of a Salesman. There's a lot of laughter in The Crucible."

Why is Miller so concerned that we like him? Maybe it's a slick PR move to change his image. Certainly, he's typed as one of the most relentless moral accusers of 20th-century literature, remonstrating us, in high school standards like The Crucible, to accept responsibility for the good of a greater humanity. But he's also comfortably situated within the handful of Great American Dramatists in this century, among the likes of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. In England, mediator Murray Biggs said, he's considered "one notch above God and one below Shakespeare."

Part of it may be that he's pitching a new play (written in 1991) called The Ride Down Mount Morgan, which he cryptically described as "a lot like the other ones." The play opened in England to popular acclaim, but in America, Miller said, his recent works have met with comparatively icy receptions. "Theater with us has not really become the life of the people," he reflected. "People just want a once-over-lightly. They feel threatened by serious theater." In a strange way, Miller feels, we would like to keep old brilliance in stasis and discourage today's new, serious talent.

These kind of comments characterize Miller, now 83, and variously a humanitarian, Vietnam War pacifist, one-time husband of Marilyn Monroe, survivor of the Great Depression, and critic of former Sen. Joe McCarthy. "McCarthy loved only two things: a bottle of whiskey and power," he said. His combination of ingenuousness and cutting wit was disarming, particularly coming from someone who looked as harmless as anyone would wearing a tacky, willow-green jacket.

Yet his unflagging sensitivity, undercut by the thick traces of a Harlem accent, covered a tremendous breadth of topics, from funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts to the recent film version of his classic, The Crucible. "It's a wonderful movie," he said. "It's one of the best pictures I know of."

He also discussed his creative process. "I am in all my characters, to some extent," he said. "Writing is a wrestling match. It depends who's stronger--the play or me."

Miller is a consummate showman, but he's also painfully honest, acutely adept at creating touching drama out of the briefest anecdote. A question about the function of other art forms in his work yielded a story about the early days of Death of a Salesman. "The form of music has always meant a great deal to me," he explained. "When Death opened for the first time, Willy Loman was played by Lee Cobb. By the end of the early runs, Lee was exhausted. He'd lost his way in the production." Then they went to hear Beethoven's 7th Symphony. "I kept whispering into Lee's ear, `This is the beginning of the second act.' For me, music is food for working."

When asked about critical reaction to his work, a less charitable, resentful side of Miller emerged. "The press is very lazy," he said. "They rejuggle concepts. The public is never given any new insights into anything."

The great dramatist has always addressed our sense of social obligation, no matter how events since Death of a Salesman may have fractured it. His plays, whether they champion the vox populi or condemn its myopia, do not submit to the amorality of absurdism or the pedantry of Brechtian parables. They are always optimistic, Miller claimed, because by invoking our honest pathos they also reveal our truest humanity. "There are no unimportant tears," he said. "That's especially true for the one who is weeping. What bothers a character of mine is what is bothering my audience. If it's not bothering anyone, nobody buys tickets."

Still, this social obligation has to end somewhere. Miller, indulgent as he is, signing copies of old plays or yellowed autograph books for 20 minutes after the event ended yesterday, could only tolerate his audience for so long. "Which character is most you, specifically?" a woman asked as Miller walked out of the auditorium. "Jeez," he said, "how am I supposed to answer a question like that? I don't know." Willy Loman probably would have approved.

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