Arthur miller how many plays

By Sophie Thomas Posted on Nov Leaving Harlem for Brooklyn, the family later suffered in the Great Depression, having to rebuild their life in the midst of forming their own American Dream. A different individual from those around him, Arthur Miller was always interested in families and ethnicities.

In , he channelled this interest into a journalism degree from the University of Michigan but still struggled to find his niche as a playwright. His second play All My Sons went on to hail the playwright as a leading contemporary cultural figure. In and , Arthur Miller was called to speak to HUAC to testify about his refusal to identify writers believed to hold Communist sympathies, stating that he would bring trouble to another person, saying the following:.

Truths come to the foreground in this dramatic play that looks at the hard reality of the American Dream. When his past comes back to haunt him, the hard worker faces his reality in this hard-hitting drama.

The Crucible : Inspired by the Salem witch trials, The Crucible tells the story of John Proctor as he tries to save himself in a community rife with witch hysteria. The betrayal in a community ramps up throughout the play ending in the courtroom, where the witch statuses are decided once and for all. A View From the Bridge : The American Dream is the central theme in this play, where you have to earn your freedom.

When I was a boy—eighteen, nineteen— I was already on the road. And there was a question in my mind as to whether selling had a future for me. Because in those days I had a yearning to go to Alaska. See, there were three gold strikes in one month in Alaska, and I felt like going out. Just for the ride, you might say. He was an adventurous man. We've got quite a little streak of self-reliance in our family. I thought I'd go out with my older brother and try to locate him, and maybe settle in the North with the old man.

And I was almost decided to go, when I met a salesman in the Parker House. His name was Dave Singleman. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. Do you know? When he died—and by the way he died the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers in the smoker of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, going into Boston—when he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral.

Things were sad on a lotta trains for months after that. He stands up. Howard has not looked at him. In those days there was personality in it, Howard. There was respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it.

You see what I mean? It is not rolling quite the way he would wish and he must pick examples of his new feelings out of the air. I never had friends—-you probably know that. But I do now, I have good friends. He moves, sitting nearer Victor, his enthusiasm flowing.

It all happens so gradually. You become a kind of instrument, an instrument that cuts money out of people, or fame out of the world. And it finally makes you stupid. Power can do that. You get to think that because you can frighten people they love you. Even that you love them. One night I found myself in the middle of my living room, dead drunk with a knife in my hand, getting ready to kill my wife. He laughs.

You get to see the terror—-not the screaming kind, but the slow, daily fear you call ambition, and cautiousness, and piling up the money. And really, what I wanted to tell you for some time now—-is that you helped me to understand that in myself. He grins warmly, embarrassed. Because of what you did. I could never understand it, Vic—-after all, you were the better student.

And to stay with a job like that through all those years seemed. You know, sometimes God mixes up the people. But sometimes. You know? The child has to grow up and go away, and the man has to learn to forget. Because after all, Eddie—-what other way can it end? Let her go. Will you do that? Ferris spoke with Miller about morality and the public role of the artist.

William R. Ferris: I'd like to begin with Death of a Salesman. In the play Willie Loman's wife says, "He's not the finest character that ever lived, but he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him, so attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Arthur Miller: I suppose she was speaking about the care and support that his family might give him, in that context. Of course, there is a larger context, which is social and even political-that a lot of people give a lot of their lives to a company or even the government, and when they are no longer needed, when they are used up, they're tossed aside.

I guess that would encompass it. He went on to say, "Mr. Miller has no moral precepts to offer and no solutions of the salesman's problems. He is full of pity, but he brings no piety to it. Miller: It depends on your vantage point.

Willie Loman's situation is even more common now than it was then. A lot of people are eliminated earlier from the productive life in this society than they used to be. I've gotten a number of letters from people who were in pretty good positions at one point or another and then were just peremptorily discarded.

If you want to call that a moral area, which I think it is, then he was wrong. What I think he was referring to was that the focus of the play is the humanity of these people rather than coming at them from some a priori political position. I think that is true. Ferris: So many of your best plays, Death of a Salesman , All My Sons , The Crucible , besides being personal tragedies, are also a commentary on society, similar to Ibsen's work.

Do you feel one person's story can transcend itself and speak to all of us? Miller: I think it depends primarily on the writer's orientation. There is a lot of work being done today which is very sharp, but there doesn't seem to be a moral dimension to them. In other words, they are not looking out beyond the personal story. That is a difficult thing to trace in a work.

I suppose if you took Moby-Dick , he could have written that as an adventure story about a whale and hunting it. Instead it became a parable involving man's fate and his struggle for power, over God even. The intensification of a work generally leads in the direction of society if it is indeed intense enough. Miller: I really don't know the answer to that. It is part of temperament. It is a part of a vision which is only definable through the work of art.

You can't start analyzing it into its parts because it falls to pieces. Ferris: Then what do you think are the core issues that a playwright should deal with?

Miller: There is no prescription that I know of, period. Whatever he feels intensely about and knows a lot about is the core issue for him. If he feels sufficiently about it and is well informed enough about it, factually and psychologically, emotionally, then that's the core issue. You make an issue. The issue isn't there, just lying around waiting to be picked up off the sidewalk. It is what the author is intense about in his life. Ferris: Would you say there is a process of playwriting that's been a constant since Greek drama, or has this process changed over time?

Miller: You know, the Greeks used to use the same stories, the same mythology, time after time, different authors. There was no premium placed upon an original story--and indeed, Shakespeare likewise.

A lot of people wrote plays about great kings. They didn't expect a brand-new story. It was what that new author made of the old story. It is probably the same now. We disguise it by inventing what seem to be new stories, but they're basically the same story anyway. Ferris: When you wrote Death of a Salesman , how were you trying to take drama and make it new, as Ezra Pound said? Miller: That play is several inventions which have been pilfered over the years by other writers. It is new in the sense that, first of all, there is very little or no waste.

The play begins with its action, and there are no transitions. It is a kind of frontal attack on the conditions of this man's life, without any piddling around with techniques.

The basic technique is very straightforward. It is told like a dream. In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another. In Salesman , there is the use of a past in the present. It has been mistakenly called flashbacks, but there are no flashbacks in that play.

It is a concurrence of a past with the present, and that's a bit different. There are numerous other innovations in the play, which were the result of long years of playwriting before that and a dissatisfaction with the way stories were told up to that point.

Ferris: In your recent article in Harper's Magazine , you write about a colorful script doctor called Saul Burry who used to hold court at Whelan's drugstore in New York City. You say that he advised one writer, "You've got too much story. Slow it down. Examine your consequences more. We're in the theater to hear our own hearts beat with brand-new knowledge, not to get surprised by some stupid door slowly opening.

Miller: That was Burry. Burry was a very insightful person. He was the best critic I ever encountered, and he was perfectly capable of talking like that. In fact, I wish I could remember more of what he said, but it's so long ago that a lot of it's just slipped away. He had a marvelous way of encapsulating ideas that had to do with playwriting and the theater.

Miller: Pay for the ticket and arrive on time, and nowadays, not to have a cell phone go off. He expected the audience to cooperate and to appreciate what was in front of him as best he could. He also, I would have thought, probably wanted them to educate themselves so that they were less inclined toward what was specious and stupid. You grew up during the Depression and you've said that you witnessed a lot of grown men lose themselves when they lost their jobs. You've also said your relationship with your own father was "like two searchlights on different islands.

Miller: Fundamentally, it left me with the feeling that the economic system is subject to instant collapse at any particular moment--I still think so--and that security is an illusion which some people are fortunate enough not to outlive. On the long run, after all, we've had these crises--I don't know how many times in the last hundred years--not only we but every country. What one lived through in that case was for America a very unusual collapse in its depth and its breadth.

A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression. Miller: It leaves one with a feeling of expectation that the thing can go down, but also with a certain pleasure, that it hadn't gone down yet. Ferris: What is it about father-son relationships that provides such good material? Miller: The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships, you know.

So this goes back. Ferris: It is nothing new. Miller: It is absolutely nothing new. This is an old story. I didn't invent it and I'm sure it will happen again and again. I heard that after you saw Streetcar , you rewrote the play you were working on at the time, Inside of His Head , and that turned into Death of a Salesman.

What did you see in Streetcar that changed your vision of your own play? Miller: Actually, Salesman was practically written by the time I saw Streetcar. What it did was to validate the use of language the way Salesman uses language. People have forgotten that, thank God, that Willie Loman isn't talking street talk; Willie Loman's talk is very formed and formal, very often.

It's almost Victorian. That was the decision I made: to lift him into the area where one could deal with his ideas and his feelings and make them applicable to the whole human race. I'm using slang in the play and different kinds of speech, but it is basically a formed, very aware use of the English language.

Of course, Tennessee was similarly a fundamentally formal writer, and he was not trying to write the way people speak on the street. So it had a relationship.

Miller: He really didn't. When I started seriously writing in the late forties, he had come to a hiatus in his writing. He hadn't been writing or hadn't at least been producing or publishing plays for some years.

His vantage point was basically religious rather than personal at that time. I'm speaking now of the late thirties and up to the end of the forties and early fifties. What certainly was a force was his dedication and his integrity. Those were maybe more important than anything else because I don't have to tell you that the spirit of Broadway is always vulgar, it's always a show shop, it's always the same thing. It never changes. To try to impose upon it something with a longer vision is very difficult.

These plays usually fail the first time around and are rejected, if not worse. You need strong teeth and to hold on like a bulldog, and that was a great example. Ferris: Is there something coming out of theater right now that is setting standards the way those three plays did in their day? Miller: If there is, I don't know about it. I don't go to the theater all that much, but I do go where there seems to be something of value.

I'm not aware of anything at the moment, but that doesn't mean there isn't. It's simply I don't see enough to make an overall judgment. Ferris: In our society of sound bites and short attention spans, is theater anachronistic? Miller: Not at all, not at all. No, it isn't by any means. Quite obviously, there is an enormous audience still there. For all I know, it's bigger than it's been in the past years. Death of a Salesman just finished a national tour, and there was no problem getting an audience.

There is a problem on the so-called commercial stage in New York, of course. The price of a ticket is exorbitant, and there are no longer original productions possible, apparently, on the commercial stage.

They are all plays that were taken from either England or smaller theaters, off-Broadway theaters, and so on. The one justification there used to be for the commercial theater was that it originated everything we had, and now it originates nothing. But the powers that be seem perfectly content to have it that way.

They don't risk anything anymore, and they simply pick off the cream. It leaves most theater at the mercy of the market, and that doesn't always reflect what's valuable.

So, there you are. Miller: Good stuff. There is no definition for these things. Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next. Ferris: In your life, you've often taken a very visible stand for what you believe in, whether it was refusing to name names at the House Un-American Activities Committee or doing advocacy against censorship.

What is the artist's role in political life? Morgan" '91 , "Broken Glass" '94 , "Mr. Peter's Connections" '98 and the satirical "Resurrection Blues" ' Few of his later plays met with critical or popular favor. After his success with "Sons" and "Salesman," Miller was attacked by conservative writers for his politics in the '50s and abandoned by most of the critical establishment after "Fall. Unlike Williams, who died during his critical eclipse, Miller lived long enough to reap the rewards of rediscovery.

Even during the '70s and '80s, when he was almost invisible on Broadway, "Salesman," "Crucible" and "Sons" in particular continued to hold their own on regional stages throughout America and abroad. Even as American producers turned their backs on his new plays, they received major productions and attention in London. Throughout their lives, Miller and Williams often were set up as rivals for the title of greatest American playwright.

Williams was characterized as the more poetic, dreamy and, in his latter years, daringly experimental artist; Miller as the rigid moralist and social realist.

The contrast isn't fair to either writer, each in his way a legitimate artistic heir to Eugene O'Neill, the giant of American drama in the first half of the 20th century. A gritty realism pervades the poetry of much of Williams' best work, as does a social conscience and a moral sense as fierce as Miller's.

Both men approached mainstream culture with the consciousness of outsiders, and Miller's Jewish identity is almost as cloaked in his early works as Williams' homosexuality is in his. Miller also experimented with form throughout his career. The structure of "Salesman" -- with dream and memory sequences intruding on the present - - confounded and excited audiences in If the play no longer seems experimental, that's only a measure of the pervasive influence "Salesman" and its author have had on the American theater.

Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.

So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Miller's career got off to a rocky start. His Broadway debut, The Man Who Had All the Luck , garnered a fate that was the antithesis of its title, closing after just four performances with a stack of woeful reviews.

Focus , Miller's novel about anti-Semitism, was published a year later. Working in a small studio that he built in Roxbury, Connecticut, Miller wrote the first act of Death of a Salesman in less than a day. The play, directed by Elia Kazan , opened on February 10, , at the Morosco Theatre, and was adored by nearly everyone, becoming an iconic stage work. The drama follows the travails of Willy Loman, an aging Brooklyn salesman whose career is in decline and who finds the values that he so doggedly pursued have become his undoing.

New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson described Willy Loman in his review of the play: "In his early sixties he knows his business as well as he ever did.

But the unsubstantial things have become decisive; the spring has gone from his step, the smile from his face and the heartiness from his personality.

He is through. The phantom of his life has caught up with him. As literally as Mr. Miller can say it, dust returns to dust.

Suddenly there is nothing. The work, in fact, swept all of the six Tony categories in which it was nominated, including for Best Direction and Best Author. In , Miller divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery, his former college sweetheart with whom he had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert. Less than a month later, Miller married actress and Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe , whom he'd first met in at a Hollywood party. When Kazan asked Miller to keep Monroe company while he dated another actress, Miller and Monroe struck up a friendship that turned into a romance.

Miller and Monroe's high-profile marriage placed the playwright in the Hollywood spotlight. At the time of their marriage, he told the press that Monroe would curtail her movie career for the "full-time job" of being his wife.