by Mel Gussow
MG: You don’t try to mimic Arthur’s voice.
DH: No, I tried to do him, but I couldn’t. I don’t know who the voice is. That just came out. It’s not my father either. The way he deals with me I deal with the sons a lot. He’s very physical.
He suddenly realized it was after six and it was time to go back to the theatre for the evening performance. We continued the conversation at breakfast the next day.
DH: Willy was a friend of Arthur’s father. Linda came from a higher stock. She married down. He’s knocked her down. In the first act, when he says, shut up, she shuts up. My father did that to my mother constantly. The story in my house: in those days, fathers didn’t bring up the children. They made the money. My father would come home and hear that there was a fight, that my brother and I were driving my mother crazy. He’d say, ‘When I have to come into this, you guys better watch out.’ In other words, when I have to start being a father, that means there’s trouble. He’d always use these images. ‘I’ll take your goddamn heads and smack them together,’ or ‘I’ll take a strap.’ I was five years old. These images would scare the shit out of me.
My father wasn’t a loser. He was a successful travelling salesman, but I don’t think he was successful in his own eyes. He had his truisms that I believe in and try to do in my work: ‘Give them more than they paid for’ and ‘Get the work done first.’
MG: Miller says you’ve been talking about doing Willy for about five years.
DH: The day I got married in Roxbury [where Miller also lives], I woke up in the morning and went for a run and went past this house. I later learned it was the house where Salesman was written. Arthur’s a first rate carpenter. He has a big workshop, where he makes tables and chairs. He built this house with his own hands when he was thirty-two and he went in and wrote Salesman. He said he would look out and say, ‘Tell me what to say, Willy?’ He said the play just came; he doesn’t know how it happened.
Arthur came over to my house and I said, ‘I’d like to do a play.’ He said, ‘You don’t want to do Salesman, do you?’ I said, ‘Why not? I just don’t want to do it now. I’m too young.’ We started talking. I said, ‘I just want to know what you think.’ We read the play aloud to Arthur. Lisa read Linda and I did my father as Willy. I said, ‘Is that him?’ He said, ‘Certain things.’ My first anchor was my father, then the more I hung around with Arthur, it was Arthur.
I listened to Cobb do it on the record. I hadn’t listened to it since we had cut it. And it depressed me. I thought I can’t do it. I recalled all the times I had watched him. To see him do Willy Loman was like watching Rodin. This fucking piece of sculpture.
MG: How do you wipe out that memory?
DH: First I tried, tried, to imitate it: let me see if I can be as good. Then I realized I couldn’t. I’m not Cobb. I don’t have his kind of power. I don’t have those guns. In a way that was a liberating thing. It took me a long time to realize that what I was going toward was the opposite. Instead of this walrus, I was going to be this spitfire. Willy Loman is an amalgam of things that Arthur wrote. Partially it’s one guy that his father knew, partially his father and partially himself. The more you get to know Arthur, you see Arthur in every character that’s in that play.
17 January 1986
‘To be a playwright . . . you have to be an alligator. You have to be able to take a whack, and be able to swallow bicycles and digest them’
At my invitation, four playwrights – Arthur Miller, Athol Fugard, David Mamet and Wallace Shawn – met at the New York Times for a symposium on playwriting. The discussion ranged widely, but focused on several questions. How are playwrights affected by world events? Can art and politics coexist in the theatre? From what sources do playwrights draw their inspiration? What is the future of a theatre confronted by increasing economic pressures? Although all agreed that there is no strong public demand for plays dealing with political and social issues, they were unanimous in feeling that this was their primary calling. A common concern about the escalating cost of theatrical production was summarized by Miller as ‘the heart of the beast’. Each writer revealed a different approach to his art – and they all valued the heterogeneity of their attitudes. There was a humorous awareness of their role as survivors and as active participants in a self-limiting profession. One could also feel in the course of the colloquy a growing sense of community among these diverse writers. These excerpts focus on Miller’s contribution to the panel.
As moderator, I began the discussion by quoting Shaw on the need for political theatre: ‘The great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life . . . to pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so that the relation to one another will become significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies.’ Then I asked the panellists to what degree a playwright’s work is shaped by world events and by the country he lives in.
Fugard said that it was impossible to tell a South African story that didn’t have political resonance. For him, a play begins when the external specifics of a story run parallel to a very private need to make a personal statement. Shawn talked about facing a kind of blank wall, then finding a little door in that wall and ‘a bit of light glitters through, and I think how exciting that is, and so I’ll write about that.’
AM: Well, listening to you guys, I’m sitting here thinking, what really sets a play off is probably some overflow of love, even if it’s the love of a form. If I suddenly see a way of telling a story, or if I find an ending, I can work backward. I find it very difficult to work from the beginning and go forward. I don’t know why; it just is. Sometimes you come upon a language accent which sets off a kind of laughter, or joy. It’s like the world is full of music but you can’t follow the tune and then suddenly, in all that chaos, you can hear a tune go by that you can repeat. There’s a lot of mimicry in it to me. The sound of it. If I can’t hear it, then I don’t write as well.
But to come back to the political side, I’ve seen the political element rise and fall several times. That is, in the ’30s, while I was still in college, a play couldn’t be thought of as being important if it didn’t refer in some way to the political logjam that existed then. Odets was the reigning important playwright, although by Broadway standards, he was delivering one failure after another. He was regarded as an important playwright but apparently not enough people wanted to see his plays. Then we got into the war and came out of that war and for a little moment in the ’40s, it was respectable to deal with political themes. I’m thinking of State of the Union, which was a comedy that dealt with elections. But soon if you said the word political in relation to a play it meant it was not artistic, it was propaganda.
Those were the years when Brecht could not be produced here, because everybody said, well, it’s propaganda, which indeed it was. But it was something else too. After The Price opened, Walter Kerr said that I would drive the remaining audience out of the theatre completely, because my inspiration came from political convictions and that people wanted a spontaneous sort of authentic feeling – and entertainment. What he meant was, ‘Don’t give me any metaphors.’ It had gone that far and people thought that Tennessee Williams was the perfection of the nonpolitical writer and therefore the most artistic writer. He might have felt insulted by that. I never discussed it with him as such, but I know he was very interested in politics.
Politics is the word for the distribution of power. You can’t move without politics. It infiltrated the PEN meeting [in New York] yesterday. I had to remind them that there are bad governments, but I remember when the government helped a lot. I couldn’t have gone through college without the government. I got $15 a month from the National Youth Adminstration. It paid my rent at the University of Michigan. Without that, I would have had to go out and do something else. When I got out of school, I was on the WPA [the F
ederal Works Project Administration]., like Saul Bellow, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten. I could name a long list of people who were fed and given bed and board by the government for a while.
We’ve really turned against the humanist tradition to such a degree that now we’re left with an anarchism which isn’t even anarchism. It’s just a blur, it’s formless. It simply repeats its own concentration on the navel. So I agree, I think that the statement of Shaw’s is terrific.
MG: If I heard you correctly, you were making a case for Tennessee Williams as a political writer.
AM: He wasn’t a political writer, but look at Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: a distribution of property by a big landowner trying to give it to his offspring. The struggle in that play is around who is capable of carrying on this society. It may be the one that isn’t the most charming, but somebody has to open the store in the morning. And if you’ve got a store, you have a problem. And without the power and politics, that play can’t exist.
The only argument I can see in all this is that we have had a kind of prejudice in American culture which tells us that the world of power is somehow separated from the rest of mankind’s pursuits, instead of being perhaps its most tragically dangerous expression. Is it really a complete accident that we’ve got an actor as the president right now? That’s a marvellous imaginary idea. That’s an act of the public imagination.
MG: Isn’t it strange that politics has been moving more toward movies and television? I don’t see playwrights today dealing with subjects such as nuclear annihilation.
AM: In the last ten years, movies and television have dealt far more often with matters of great import than the stage has. There have been numerous, well done movies and some television on what we used to call great issues. And in the theatre hardly at all. The theatre has become far more inward looking when formerly it was the extroverted art. I’m not sure I know the reasons. We’ve obviously delimited the New York audience to those people who can pay the price. As we all know, the schoolteacher isn’t there, the ordinary civil service employee can’t afford to go, students very rarely, etc. So we’ve got a skimming of the population. And maybe that has had some effect on what is appreciated, what they want from that art.
If we had a more democratic art, maybe it would be otherwise. I think of England, where probably they’re dealing more with public issues, and more extroverted art. But it’s also a theatre that is first of all cheaper by some good percentage. And it is, to some degree, subsidized so that the public has got a chance to see it. Maybe that’s part of the reason. But I’ve found the theatre here has turned into an art form that is ingrown. It’s super-sophisticated. Very often the theatre relies on cultural cues of a small group of people who get the signal rather than reinterpreting the material into a universal language.
Fugard: That’s a very provocative thought. Something like inbreeding, in a sense.
AM: That’s a good word, yes. Too often, the theatre talks to itself. The black audience, the working people, the rest of them who wouldn’t understand these clues, aren’t there.
MG: Isn’t it strange that politics has been moving more toward movies – a popular form – and you’re making the case for theatre becoming an elitist art, even as that audience goes out to see Cats.
AM: They do go to see the musicals pre-eminently. We used to think that a hit ran a couple of seasons. I don’t think a straight play now could look forward to that popularity.
AM: I just came from Lithuania a few weeks ago. A Soviet novelist named Aitmatov Chingiz wrote this terrific book, which was interpreted as an attack on Stalinism. And yet he’s one of the biggest guys in the Communist Party and the Writers Union. I saw a play in Lithuania based on his novel. It’s a powerful thing. I said, ‘How does that work?’ One woman said, ‘Well, when he speaks he lies, but when he writes he tells the truth.’ And that’s true of a lot of us. It’s not that we’re lying. It’s that verbalizing something automatically eliminates a lot of the emotional connections which give them their truth. So what you’re doing is giving a résumé of what you felt.
Mamet said that the question was about the will of the people versus the will of the individual: ‘We’ve all had the experience of getting whacked on the head one time, two times and saying, ‘I don’t care, I don’t care. I’ll go on and I will be heard.’
AM: A lot of plays don’t get written because the writer lacks a certain characterological toughness. You know, to be a playwright you not only have to be a writer, you have to be an alligator. A lot of writers are not alligators. I mean, in my lifetime I’ve known ten or twelve people who were really talented people, but they couldn’t take the abuse. A playwright lives in an occupied country. He’s the enemy. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.
MG: Why do you say alligator?
Fugard: His skin.
AM: It’s tough! He’s got to be able to take a whack, and he’s got to swallow bicycles and digest them. [General laughter.] There is a repression, I think, finally as a result of the prevailing taste, which is re-enforced by critics who voice it. There has been a kind of an automatic admiration of the parodistic idea. In other words, it’s better that the emotion not be directly expressed. The theatre has eliminated a lot of pain. I remember a time when it was directly the opposite, where the needle was north, namely, that important work was thought to be work that never let the audience off the hook.
All the plays that I was trying to write, all the plays that playwrights like O’Neill were trying to write, that Tennessee was writing, these were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from. I admire a play like Amadeus technically, but I saw Mozart’s dying as a kind of a joke in that play. I know Peter Shaffer didn’t intend it that way but the audience takes it as a real laugh riot. Every time Mozart laid his pen to paper, it was a masterpiece of some kind. When you think of the ones that he never got to write and idiocy of his dying at that age. The way it was presented, it made us feel remote.
In any case, whether it’s better or worse, it would never have been done that way through the ’40s and into the ’50s. Which dares a little discussion because I think the real chasm came for us with Beckett. It’s not just Beckett, it’s the whole absurd department. Because that distanced pain a lot. Maybe life is too painful now. I know very responsible people who say, ‘I don’t want to go to the theatre and experience pain. I don’t want to be gripped. I want two hours to go by where I have quote unquote pleasure.’Aesthetically we are aware of the pain in Beckett, but I wonder if it’s not too abstract for many people.
Shawn said it was terribly hard today for a writer to write truthfully about the suffering of an individual person, even though there were people suffering the tragedies that Willy Loman suffered. He added, ‘It would be absolutely my dream to be able to write a play about that suffering, and yet I’m unable to.’
AM: I absolutely agree with you. I don’t really think a Blanche DuBois or a Willy Loman would be forthcoming today. Certainly the critical fraternity would say, well, it’s a little too lush emotionally.
MG: I would think that if there were an equivalent of Willy Loman today, it would be overwhelming.
AM: Two years ago, to pick an arbitrary time, I would have said you were wrong. I think that we may be in a moment of shift again. Maybe we’ve come to the end of what I call the abstraction of emotion. It is possible in the theatre as in music that a little change in emphasis changes everything. To get that catharsis, there has to be a very fine line between what this thing means and what it is emotionally. If you go in one direction, it just becomes pathetic, and in the other direction it becomes quite abstract and we don’t get the man in the middle. In other words, somehow a work has to endanger the people. We’ve got to endanger their common equilibrium.
Since everything is OK in this society, they just let us talk. In a repressive society, the word is dynamite, it’s simply dynamite.
AM: Our problem here is not political censorship. It’s the commercial censorship. It’s a commercial choice. If you’re with it, you’re OK. If you’re not with it in some way, you’re way outside there, just as outside as you could be in a repressive society.
MG: Müller also said that the primary problem with the American people was economics. The question was raised: if the economic troubles of the American theatre could be solved, would there be a political language that would be heard? In effect, he was asking if political playwrights and plays existed.
Mamet answered with a long discussion about the body politic ending with an analysis of Tolstoy’s use of power in War and Peace. Soon we were off on a vigorous discussion of the theatre critics at the New York Times, and whether or not they represented the readership – or the electorate – of the newspaper.
MG: I think if you look at the range of people who have held the various critical positions at the Times, from Stark Young through Brooks Atkinson on to today, you’ll see that they really are individuals.
AM: Incidentally, this is a political conversation. It is what I mean by politics.
MG: Arthur, you’ve said that the economics of the theatre is really one of the most boring subjects to speak about and yet in the end it is the most consequential in terms of the continuing validity of today’s theatre.
AM: It is the heart of the beast.
MG: Is there any solution?
Fugard said that if ever he came up against a wall again in South Africa, he would do as he did with The Blood Knot. He would ‘beg, borrow and steal the bucks,’ find a space and do the play. ‘Is that not possible for you chaps?’