by Mel Gussow
AM: It is. But all the levels are quite different. See, we have levels of expense Off Broadway now that are simply breathtaking. I don’t know – where could you go?
Fugard: Can I ask a question, because I don’t know how this system works? You have written a new play, David, and it involves two actors. And we’re sick and tired of this whole economic scene, but we’re going to try and survive in New York. You come to Wally and to me and you say, ‘Come on, chaps, let’s do it.’ And we say . . . let’s find an attic. Let’s put up some lights and let’s do it.’ Do you see anything to stop us?
Mamet said no, except for problems with Actors Equity and the fire marshall. If necessary, they could form a theatre club.
AM: Well, you could do it up to a point. Even if you’re a club, and you’ve got, say, seventy-five people coming into somebody’s living room regularly – they’ll get there. Then we have another problem. You and Wally are in this play, and Mel Gussow comes to see it. He finds out about it. OK, and it’s an event, right? Wally is simply fantastic – [to Fugard] you’re all right, but Wally is absolutely fantastic.
Fugard [laughing]: I don’t like this story anymore now.
AM: And three movie guys come in and say to Wally, ‘We have a great film that you would be marvellous in.’
And Wally says, ‘No, I don’t want to leave this play.’And they say, ‘Well, it’s $30,000 a week.’ And after about a month, Wally’s looking for his rent money and he says, ‘If I did it for just one week.’
And it begins to go like that. The Group Theatre was the archtypical example of this. They bucked the system for four, five, six years. But they were so damn good that every time they opened a show some Hollywood guy would say, ‘Franchot Tone, here’s a movie.’ And then he looks around and says, ‘Jesus Christ, what am I eating cheese sandwiches for?’ Then the theatre was vitiated. We’re talking about an elitist idea, aren’t we? We’re not reaching into the great unwashed out there in Newark.
So my question is, why in the hell must we hide in a closet to do our work? You mean that we aren’t allowed as artists to head a proper theatre? I go to visit actors Off Broadway, and they’re all huddled in some toilet where all the clothes are hanging, and everybody says, ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ What is so wonderful about this? I wouldn’t put my dogs in there! The water is rusty in the sink, the women can’t find any place to change. It’s appalling! And uptown there are billionaires living in forty-six rooms. I don’t get the joke there. I think we deserve better than that. I don’t mean we should all be treated like kings, but at least not like bums.
MG: Is there anything anyone wants to say in summary – or not in summary?
AM: Let’s give three cheers for the theatre! Or three and a half. You know, our audience now has heard everything three times and we need to get people who haven’t heard it yet. The Russians have a wonderful phrase, the true word, meaning the quote-unquote truth is what they want in the theatre, an expression of some kind of an insight that would tell them how to live, not how to amuse themselves.
18 November 1986
‘There’s nobody up here but us chickens’
Early in 1987, two new one-act plays by Arthur Miller, I Can’t Remember Anything and Clara, were scheduled to open at Lincoln Center. Collectively they were titled Danger: Memory! This was the first time his work was at Lincoln Center since 1964, when Incident at Vichy was presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. On November 18, 1986, we met for the first in a series of conversations. I picked him up at his Manhattan apartment and we walked to a neighbourhood restaurant. It was noisy: we were flooded with sound, both spoken and musical. I began by remarking on his activity. In addition to the one-acts, there was a production of All My Sons coming up on public television and The American Clock was moving from the Cottesloe to the Olivier at London’s National Theatre. His memoir, Timebends, was also scheduled to be published in 1987 on both sides of the Atlantic.
AM: I’ve never been this busy. I don’t know why it all piled up, but it certainly did. Europe has been terrific. There’s a new production of The Crucible in Hungary of all places – again – apparently this time for political reasons. And Francois Perrier is doing Salesman in Paris. I also have The Archbishop’s Ceiling in the RSC’s Pit. There had been a production at the Bristol Old Vic about a year and a half ago, which I didn’t see. Those who have seen this [RSC] production say the other was better.
MG: That’s a first: being able to compare two productions of The Archbishop’s Ceiling.
AM: The RSC production is sold out, and they’ll go on with it indefinitely. And Alan Ayckbourn is directing A View from the Bridge in February [at the National Theatre in London]. There’s an actor there [Michael Gambon] who they’re talking about as the new Olivier. The National, which usually has trouble with money, called me and said this was going to be a great event, and would I come. I said, ‘Well you’re going to have to pay for it.’ So I may go over there.
MG: How do you explain the renewed interest in your work?
AM: It may be that the social and moral concerns in those plays are now on the agenda again. For a long time, there was an affectation to the effect that no judgments could be made about anything. Of course, these plays, implicitly or explicitly, create a moral universe. And maybe that’s new.
MG: One charge was that many of your plays are of their period, that a play like All My Sons dealt with a specific issue at a specific time. The feeling was that The Crucible dealt with a particular issue at two different times, and that The American Clock was a Depression play.
AM: With All My Sons, it’s not just this little guy causing a couple of airplanes to fall down. Now it’s the space shuttle, and it turns out that nobody is taking responsibility.
MG: Do you think the morality of the plays is the major factor in the increased interest?
AM: I don’t know what the major factor is. I think it’s a new factor. In the last decade, the movies took up issues such as All My Sons does. I’m thinking of that one that Jane Fonda did [The China Syndrome] and the one that [Mike] Nichols directed [Silkwood]. That’s dropped out of theatre. Maybe that’s part of the rediscovery. In England there is a steady supply of plays at the RSC and the National as well as in the regional theatres, plays about what you could call social issues, like this one about [Rupert] Murdoch [Pravda by Howard Brenton and David Hare]. That play could have been written by the WPA theatre, although I don’t know if they could have done it as well.
MG: You might say that in England, political theatre comes with the territory. David Mamet has said that if you’re an English playwright that’s what you write about.
AM: The audience here hasn’t felt pain in a long time. There’s no great systemic upheaval.
MG: The other day I went to see a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth Off Broadway and it seemed dated where All My Sons, which seemed to be of its period, is not. Sometimes I think that perhaps it’s the specificity of a work that makes it survive.
AM: The attitude in Skin of Our Teeth is basically sentimental: Wilder’s positive feelings towards humanity are enough to float this ship which manifestly is sinking without a trace – namely civilization. For no good reason, he’s saying, don’t worry, we’ll survive. That was also true of Saroyan: an implicit sentimental optimism. There’s nothing like that in All My Sons.
MG: Will we survive?
AM: It’s a damn good question. I always used to say, somebody is going to light a match in a warm room and blow the whole fucking thing up. That Chernobyl thing is the lighting of the match. Literally, it’s like going down a hill in a truck. Shut off the engine and remove the brakes and see what happens. You know I worked in the navy yard during the war. They used to have these unbelievable cranes picking up tonnage. They were on rails and they would go around the yard like monsters, moving big steel plates from one point to another. There was some guy running the crane, about four stories up, looking down at these little mice running around. One day he got out of
the crane and left it. Here’s a crane moving by itself at a pretty good speed. Someone had to catch up with it, climb up to it. What kind of man would do this? That’s the kind of thing that gives you pause. There’s no time to react.
My daughter, who is twenty-four now, is of a generation that melodramatizes itself a bit. The convention among those kids is that the world is not going to let them mature to old age. You send those kids to see The Skin of Our Teeth? All My Sons is much more modern than that. Stoppard has this attitude that everything is happening on the edge of a cliff, and the actors are about to be pushed off. [He laughs.] That amuses me. I feel that’s very contemporary. In my work, the same thing takes a different form. Somebody is going to die in this play, or somebody has died, as in After the Fall. Wilder is writing after the victory; I’m writing before the defeat.
MG: With you, the victory never comes?
AM: The assumption of Wilder is that we have made it. I was driving in to New York this morning and the guy on the radio said, ‘We’re going to have to close midtown Manhattan within the next few years. You can’t get the cars in.’ I was laughing with Inge. It took me an hour and forty minutes to get from Connecticut, which is a hundred miles away, to the West Side highway; it took three quarters of an hour to get from 60th Street on the West Side highway to Eighth Avenue and 58th Street. All that horsepower – it’s not going anywhere. Nobody’s going anywhere.
MG: Do you feel closer to Samuel Beckett than to Thornton Wilder?
AM: Absolutely. You see what hope there is in my plays is left in the lap of the audience. It’s a challenge whether you want to hope or not – because the evidence is pretty bad. You’ve got one man who stands up there and says, ‘It’s all bullshit.’
MG: Why should the audience hope?
AM: Because they want to. They want to hope that, through him, this will spread, that there can be resistance to falsehood.
MG: Does that mean that theatregoers come out of Waiting for Godot and they think somehow, somewhere, someone will come?
AM: That’s right.
MG: Maybe tomorrow.
AM: Or in an hour. I didn’t see him on this block, but he may be around the corner.
MG: Cynicism is part of your survival?
AM: It’s not cynicism. I’m always ready to believe. If you read the Book of Job and you add up the evidence, the case is hopeless. Job should put a bullet in his head. But the sun is going to come up tomorrow and he might feel differently. [Laugh.] That’s about as good as you can put it. Look at the evidence. He’s absolutely crushed by reality.
MG: As you say that, I’m thinking of all the people who die in your plays.
AM: Very bad evidence. Not a good sign. One of the ones who noticed this was the chairman of the UnAmerican Activities Committee, Mr. [Congressman Francis E.] Walter, who said to me, ‘With all your talent, why do you write so tragically about this country?’ He wanted the good news. I can only bring the good news after the bad news. The good news is simply that we’re here and we’ve got an obligation to ourselves.
Incidentally, that’s the question Russian writers used to be asked. Why write tragedy? We want romance, romantic optimism. I think now it’s a different case. When I talked to Gorbachev, he said, ‘All I ask of literature is that the fate of humanity is involved; the rest is up to you.’ That it be not trivial. That to me is a given; it comes with the territory. Why in the face of that we should have anything other than complete nihilism, that’s the question. And I go back to biology. If you look at the child before he is educated, he wants to live. That’s reality.
MG: As you get older, does your attitude about writing change?
AM: I enjoy it more now, because I think I have less of a dependency on what anybody else makes of my work. One reason for that is practical. For example, The American Clock ran here for about four days, maybe a week, and I go to London eight or ten years later and see it and audiences are standing up and cheering. And The Archbishop’s Ceiling, we couldn’t even bring in to New York. That was my fault because I made changes in it that I should never have made. I went back to the original for this production. I guess I simply have a longer view. The critics are much younger than I am. The idea of one’s peers is a little weakened. I love good reviews better than anything. The shock to the ego when you get bad reviews!
MG: You’ve lost your critical peers and also your playwriting peers.
AM: There’s nobody up here but us chickens. [Laugh.]
MG: Who are your peers?
AM: In this country, I don’t know of anybody even close to my age in the theatre as a writer.
MG: At one point, when you, Tennessee Williams and William Inge were all on Broadway, didn’t you feel you were in a much more active theatrical environment?
AM: It’s difficult to define, but there was what I would call a theatre culture. A theatre culture means a lot of plays going on, most of them trivial, a few of them reflecting the moment. They may not be masterpieces, but they are reflecting the hour in which one is living. Actors trying to be contemporary people. An audience that has been to more than two plays in the last five years, and knows that this play is different from that play and related to that other play. That may exist, unbeknownst to me, but I don’t sense it. OK, I’m hoping that we can create some kind of viable audience at Lincoln Center that is passionately interested in this, but I don’t know if that’s possible anymore.
I saw [John] Guare’s play [a revival of The House of Blue Leaves at Lincoln Center] and I was really happily surprised that so many young people were in the audience, under twenty-eight or twenty-six. I went to see Spalding Gray. That was a young audience, although you would have thought that would have attracted an older audience. I enjoyed that immensely.
MG: When you and Tennessee were running neck and neck, did you feel a sense of competitiveness?
AM: I don’t want to sound insanely generous, but I used to hope that he would have a big hit, partially for selfish reasons. I was already hearing people say, ah, there’s nothing new in the theatre. I would desperately try to think of things for them to go to see. My sense of doom was very sharp. And this is back in the ’50s. They mustn’t get disillusioned with this theatre. And the more the merrier. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want better reviews than he got. But I certainly wanted him to get a terrific reception. He wrote a letter which I got a copy of just two days ago, which is to this point. There’s a man writing his biography. We met quite by chance and he said, ‘Oh, you’re mentioned in a couple of his letters.’ So he sent me these letters and in the letter which he sent to Audrey Wood from Rome, he says, everybody sends me these notices of Death of a Salesman. The gist of it was that he was nervous and happy. He read the play and he loved it.
He liked me too and I liked him. There was that side of him, plus the competitive side. But I’m sure it excited him to know that he was not alone. I wish we had twenty-five other playwrights, for my own selfish reasons. And I suppose what I’m doing now is totally unrealistic, but I still get excited about it. I know that I planted that seed that’s going to be going on forever. It’ll pop up in India, Hungary. Nobody promised me a rose garden.
In fact, years ago when I was on the Dramatists Guild board, I made a few regrettable remarks to the effect that maybe we were taking too much money out of the theatre and what we had to do was start a movement to reduce everybody’s take. That caused a meeting to be held. Mr. Shubert came, they got the unions in and I made a speech to them. The ticket price then was probably $10 or $8. I said, ‘You know a lot of my friends don’t come anymore because they haven’t got the money for it. I think we ought to find a way to reduce our costs.’ Lee Shubert just sat there. Herman Shumlin got up, screaming that producers are starving to death. I turned to Mr. Shubert and said, ‘What do you think?’ He never answered.
MG: Tennessee always had this thing about wanting one more major Broadway success.
AM: Yes, I would, too. Not Broadway. I couldn’t care le
ss where it was. I could see it at the Vivian Beaumont and play it for twelve weeks. The great thing about the theatre, from my experience, is that it does go on, continually.
MG: But you do want, as you say, more respect.
AM: You know, everybody’s forgotten but Ibsen ran for three weeks in Norway. Then he went to Germany where the plays ran a little longer. He made his living from his books, selling those plays. I would like to simplify the whole image a little more for myself. Say I get eight weeks, with a terrific production. It’s worth writing plays. I have to say that, because the other way is hopeless: the dependency upon producers, critics, audiences. We are close to the bottom.
MG: Have you always been able to make a living in the theatre?
AM: I shouldn’t say I made it all out of the theatre because I made some out of films, but no great fortune. Basically my income has come from productions here and abroad, which are not necessarily Broadway productions. You make a lot on Broadway but I would bet that I made more from amateur rights and regional theatre productions.
MG: More from Salesman than anything else?
AM: No. Salesman is not produced nearly as much as The Crucible. The reason for that is obvious. For Salesman, you need a big actor. A lot of companies don’t have that. And secondly there are a lot of parts for women in The Crucible. Most of these companies have a lot of women. And it’s a much easier play to make happen.
MG: You write because you want to write but also because you have to sustain an income.
AM: You know, I enjoy doing other things: making furniture – and I have children all over the place. Big ones, little ones, grandchildren. I have three grandchildren in California. So I could occupy myself easily enough. But there’s an intensification of feeling when you create a play, which doesn’t exist in me in any other thing I can do. It’s a way of spiritually living. I guess people who take drugs know the difference between being sober and being on something. Once it’s started, there’s a pleasure there that’s indescribable. It doesn’t exist in real life, because you’re really making the whole thing happen.