The world lost one of its last great men yesterday. Playwright Arthur Miller died at his home in Connecticut at the age of 89...
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Death Of A Salesman, or when I first read After The Fall. I was a 17 year-old 4th year drama student and I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. But that’s how Miller’s work hit people. As a personality, however, Miller always felt familiar and approachable to me, and I suspect many others have felt that way about him. He was down-to-earth and pragmatic, and people who knew him say he possessed a wonderful sense of humor. Brian Dennehey, who played the role of Willy Loman in Death Of A Salesman on Broadway last year, said that Miller was never bored by anything because everything interested him. He was a truly great man—a true intellectual. How many more can we have left?
Miller was a man with much to say and he was never afraid to voice his thoughts. Although The Crucible is a dramatization of the Salem witch trials, it’s very clear that through it he was voicing his outrage at McCarthyism. Later, he was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In his autobiography he wrote that during a performance of The Crucible, after the scene in which John Proctor is executed, the audience rose and stood silently with their heads bowed, because it was at that very moment that the Rosenbergs were being executed. One wonders what he felt about our country’s current climate of moralistic ideology, the Conservatives’ desire to write discrimination into the Constitution, and the blurring of the lines between church and state.
Many people know his name only because he was married to Marilyn Monroe for a while, but his genius is what will carry him into history, where he will sit among other great playwrights such as Wilde, O’Neill, Chekhov, Kaufman, Coward, Shaw, Ibsen, Inge, Pinter, and probably even Shakespeare.
