Month: October 2008

From http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/arthur-miller/none-without-sin/56/

In the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Profoundly influenced by the Depression and the war that immediately followed it, Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche. His probing dramas proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times, allowing people an honest view of the direction the country had taken.

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan in 1915 to Jewish immigrant parents. By 1928, the family had moved to Brooklyn, after their garment manufacturing business began to fail. Witnessing the societal decay of the Depression and his father's desperation due to business failures had an enormous effect on Miller. After graduating from high school, Miller worked a number of jobs and saved up the money for college. In 1934, he enrolled in the University of Michigan and spent much of the next four years learning to write and working on a number of well-received plays.

After graduating, Miller returned to New York, where he worked as a freelance writer. In 1944, his first play, "The Man Who Had All the Luck", opened to horrible reviews. A story about an incredibly successful man who is unhappy with that success, "The Man Who Had All The Luck" was already addressing the major themes of Miller's later work. In 1945, Miller published a novel, FOCUS, and two years later had his first play on Broadway. "All My Sons," a tragedy about a manufacturer who sells faulty parts to the military in order to save his business, was an instant success. Concerned with morality in the face of desperation, "All My Sons" appealed to a nation having recently gone through both a war and a depression.

Only two years after the success of "All My Sons," Miller came out with his most famous and well-respected work, "Death of a Salesman." Dealing again with both desperation and paternal responsibility, "Death of a Salesman" focused on a failed businessman as he tries to remember and reconstruct his life. Eventually killing himself to leave his son insurance money, the salesman seems a tragic character out of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. Winning both a Pulitzer Prize and a Drama Critics Circle Award, the play ran for more than seven hundred performances. Within a short while, it had been translated into over a dozen languages and had made its author a millionaire.

Overwhelmed by post-war paranoia and intolerance, Miller began work on the third of his major plays. Though it was clearly an indictment of the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, "The Crucible" was set in Salem during the witch-hunts of the late 17th century. The play, which deals with extraordinary tragedy in ordinary lives, expanded Miller's voice and his concern for the physical and psychological wellbeing of the working class. Within three years, Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and convicted of contempt of Congress for not cooperating. A difficult time in his life, Miller ended a short and turbulent marriage with actress Marilyn Monroe. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote very little of note, concentrating at first on issues of guilt over the Holocaust, and later moving into comedies.

It was not until the 1991 productions of his "The Ride Down Mount Morgan" and "The Last Yankee" that Miller's career began to see a resurgence. Both plays returned to the themes of success and failure that he had dealt with in earlier works. Concerning himself with the American dream, and the average American's pursuit of it, Miller recognized a link between the poverty of the 1920s and the wealth of the 1980s. Encouraged by the success of these works, a number of his earlier pieces returned to the stage for revival performances.

More than any other playwright working today, Arthur Miller has dedicated himself to the investigation of the moral plight of the white American working class. With a sense of realism and a strong ear for the American vernacular, Miller has created characters whose voices are an important part of the American landscape. His insight into the psychology of desperation and his ability to create stories that express the deepest meanings of struggle, have made him one of the most highly regarded and widely performed American playwrights. In his eighty-fifth year, Miller remains an active and important part of American theater.

Timeline of Arthur Miller’s life up to “Death of a Salesman.” From http://www.ibiblio.org/miller/life.html

1915 Arthur Aster Miller was born on October 17th in New York City; family lives at 45 West 110th Street.

1920-28 Attends Public School #24 in Harlem.

1923 Sees first play–a melodrama at the Schubert Theater.

1928 Bar-mitzvah at the Avenue M temple. Father’s business struggling and family move to Brooklyn, 1350 East 3rd Street. Attends James Madison HIgh School.

1930 Reassigned to the newly built Abraham Lincoln High School. Plays on football team.

1931 Delivery boy for local bakery before school, and works for father’s business over summer vacation.

1933 Graduates from Abraham Lincoln High School. Registers for night school at City College, but quits after two weeks.

1933-34 Clerked in an auto-parts warehouse, where he was the only Jew employed and had his first real, personal experiences of American anti-semitism.

1934 Enters University of Michigan in the Fall to study journalism. Reporter and night editor on student paper, The Michigan Daily.

1936 Writes No Villain in six days and receives Hopwood Award in Drama. Transfers to an English major.

1937 Takes playwrighting class with Professor Kenneth T. Rowe. Rewrite of No Villain, titled, They Too Arise, receives a major award from the Bureau of New Plays and is produced in Ann Arbor and Detroit. Honors at Dawn receives Hopwood Award in Drama. Drives Ralph Neaphus East to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain during their Civil War, and decides not to go with him.

1938 The Great Disobedience receives second place in the Hopwood contest. They Too Arise is revised and titled The Grass Still Grows for anticipated production in New York City (never materializes). Graduates with a B.A. in English. Joins the Federal Theater Project in New York City to write radio plays and scripts, having turned down a much better paying offer to work as a scriptwriter for Twentieth Century Fox, in Hollywood.

1939 Writes Listen My Children, and You’re Next with Norman Rosten. Federal Theater is shut down and has to go on relief. William Ireland’s Confession airs on Colimbia Workshop.

1940 Travels to North Carolina to collect dialect speech for the folk division of the Library of Congress. Marries Mary Grace Slattery. Writes The Golden Years. Meets Clifford Odets in a second-hand bookstore. The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man, a radio play airs on Columbia Workshop (CBS)

1941 Takes extra job working nightshift as a shipfitter’s helper at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Writes other radio plays, Joel Chandler Harris, and Captain Paul.

1942 Writes radio plays The Battle of the Ovens, Thunder fron the Mountains, I Was Married in Bataan, Toward a Farther Star, The Eagle’s Nest, and The Four Freedoms.

1943 Writes The Half-Bridge, and one-act, That They May Win, produced in New York City. Writes Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play).

1944 Daughter, Jane, is born. Writes radio plays Bernadine, I Love You, Grandpa and t he Statue, and The Phillipines Never Surrendered. Adapts Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the radio. Having toured army camps to research for The Story of G.I. Joe (a film for which he wrote the initial draft screenplay, but later withdrew from project when he saw they would not let him write it his way), he publishes book about experience, Situation Normal. The Man Who Had All The Luck premiers on Broadway but closes after six performances (including 2 previews), though receives the Theater Guild National Award.

1945 Focus (novel) published. Writes Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play). Writes “Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?” for New Masses (article).

1946 Adapts George Abbott’s and John C. Holm’s Three Men on a Horse for radio.

1947 All My Sons premiers and receives the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award. Son, Robert, is born. Writes The Story of Gus (radio play). Writes “Subsidized Theatre” for The New York Times (article). Goes to work for a short time in an inner city factory assembling beer boxes for minimum wage to stay in touch with his audience. Gives first interview to John K. Hutchens, for The New York Times. Explores the Red Hook area and tries to get into the world of the longshoremen there, and find out about Pete Panto, whose story would form the nucleus of his screenplay The Hook. Buys farmhouse in Roxbury Connecticut as a vacation home, and 31 Grace Court in the city.

1948 Built himself the small Connecticut studio in which he wrote Death of a Salesman. Trip to Europe with Vinny Longhi where got sense of the Italian background he would use for the Carbones and their relatives, also met some Jewish deathcamp survivors held captive in a post-war tangle of bureaucracy.

1949 Death of a Salesman premiers and receives the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, and the Theater Club Award, among others. New York Times publishes “Tragedy and the Common Man” (essay). Attends the pro-Soviet Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to chair an arts panel with Odets and Dmitri Shostakovich.

By Alex Nicolson       

 

Caitlyn has already touched on this, but I'll add some ideas of my own regarding characters and their particular dialogue.

 

Perhaps most interestingly, is Biff's name, which is short, harsh, and masculine. It is monosyllabic, and comes out of the mouth with a puff of air, and is onomatopoeia-like for a punching noise. It also rhymes with "if" which is perhaps a metaphor for Biff's character as a whole. His life, at least as Willy sees it, has been a giant wasted "if." What if Biff hadn't flunked math? What if he had gone to UVA? The Ifs roll on and on.

 

Happy on the other hand, always says things to make people happy. He uses the language of compromise, even telling half-truths and outright lies to keep the illusion of tranquility in the Loman household. Happy almost constantly asks questions, belying his insecurity and also giving his lines a higher, whinier pitch. By never making statements, he never asserts himself, always phrasing things in the less decisive form of a question, asking for the approval of those around him. However, he often uses superlatives, claiming Willy "has the finest eye for color in the business," for example. He constantly exaggerates so that he never speaks his mind plainly, but rather cloaks it all in a sugar coating to keep everyone happy.

 

In stark contrast to Happy, Linda rarely asks questions, and almost always makes statements and accusations. This gives her a much more decisive, confident sound, and reinforcing her as the stable foundation the family is built on. While she speaks far less than the other characters, when she does speak, it is always a poignant observation straight to the heart of the matter, with no frills or fluff.