by Mel Gussow
MG: You could ask, do artists survive adversity, or do they thrive in adversity?
AM: I can only tell you I never had a critic in my corner in this country – excepting for Brooks Atkinson.
MG: But who has? Playwrights don’t have critics in their corner.
AM [contemplative]: I guess you’re right.
MG: Take Pinter in England. Tynan wasn’t in his corner.
AM: That’s right.
MG: Except for Tynan and Osborne, and perhaps O’Neill and George Jean Nathan – and even then, not always.
AM: As I look back, I honestly feel that I have nothing to complain about.
MG: But you’re always complaining.
AM: Well, yeah, you’ve got to keep the ball in the air. [Laugh.] But I really don’t complain. I don’t think I do. All I would want would be that critics, so to speak, illuminate the young, because they are followed so slavishly by them.
AM: By the way, I went to see the David Hare play [Skylight] last week. I was touched by parts of it. Of course I’m crazy about both those actors [Michael Gambon and Lea Williams]. You couldn’t do it without Gambon. You wouldn’t be able to withstand the screaming. He can take a deep breath, talk in a normal voice and shake the building. Another actor would have to be screaming his head off to get that force. I liked the play, but I didn’t feel I had been grabbed by the throat, which is what Hare was trying to do. I’m a great fan of Gambon’s. I know him a little bit, after A View from the Bridge. In a way, he’s better than Olivier was, because Olivier always let you know he was doing this and isn’t it wonderful? Gambon can really disappear into a role. When you look back, Olivier was saying, now I’m going to show you how I’m going to do this. He never melted into a role. I don’t think he was capable of doing that. He was interpreting the role, a little bit like [Vladimir] Horowitz playing. You always knew what Horowitz was doing; he was in total control.
MG: Gambon is the greater pianist? Who else? Is there an actress you especially admire?
AM: Of course the great one to me: she played the detective in the British series.
MG: Helen Mirren. She and Gambon did Antony and Cleopatra. The two of them were great together.
AM: You know, she did two one-act plays of mine in London. She played a whore in one of them. It was hilarious, and so moving. Why don’t we create actors like that? I suppose we do with De Niro. He’s a great actor.
MG: What young playwrights do you like?
AM: I keep thinking Robbie Baitz [Jon Robin Baitz] is going to come up with something. I think he’s got a real talent. Of course, Mamet is there already. There’s no doubt about that. Who else? I don’t see enough to have an opinion. There was one very funny satire of Tennessee [For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, Christopher Durang’s thirty-minute spoof of The Glass Menagerie]. That was funny.
MG: Have there been many parodies of your work?
AM: They used to do it years ago. Not any more. I think they wore it out. They usually did Salesman. They can do Tennessee because he opens himself to parody. It’s just on the verge; they overwrite it a little more . . . It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with the film [The Crucible]. It is asking an audience for something they don’t normally have to give to a movie. They’ve got to listen, for one thing, and they’ve got to feel for people who are very strange. Except now they see all sorts of strange people on screen; they have horns . . .
MG: As people tend to forget, the events in The Crucible really happened.
MG: I was curious about the original titles of your plays. For All My Sons, it was The Sign of the Archer. Salesman was Free and Clear.
AM: That wasn’t mine. [Laugh.] In desperation, when we were getting close to going into rehearsal, Kermit Bloomgarden [the producer] went into a panic. He said, ‘Nobody’s going to see a play with death in its title.’ They actually paid for a poll taken on Broadway, asking people if they would go to see a play called Death of a Salesman, and of course nobody would. And so I said, look, I’m not changing this. He said, let me suggest some titles. Be my guest. That was one of them. I said, ‘You write a play called Free and Clear, but that’s not this play.’
MG: Was there an alternate title for The Crucible?
AM: I had a great problem with the title. I remember sitting alone in the old Blue Ribbon restaurant on 44th Street. I was there with this notebook and I must have had twenty titles. I had to have it by the next day, because that’s when the ads were starting. I kept reverting to The Crucible, and I thought if I say The Crucible, they’re all going to faint dead away. The great thing was that Jed Harris was a snob, and Kermit Bloomgarden didn’t know what a crucible was, and probably ninety-five per cent of the audience didn’t either. But simply because most people wouldn’t know what it was, Jed said, that’s a great title. He connected it with the cross, with crucifixion, which is fine.
MG: But that’s not The Crucible.
AM: No, but you could make some kind of connection. It was Jed really, because Kermit looked to him for show business. Jed thought it was a usable title.
MG: Why did you choose The Crucible?
AM: I wanted something that would indicate literally the burning away of the impurities, which is what the play is doing. There are all kinds of images of fire in these other titles, burning, not of witches, but of the impurities. This seemed to me to put it in one symbolic word.
MG: Albee said about you that your plays and your conscience are ‘a cold burning force.’
AM [laughs]: Sounds like coal-burning.
MG: What do you think of Albee’s work?
AM: I like Three Tall Women a lot. I thought it was a really imaginative use of the theatre, and of his own material. Some of the others seem to me to be fixated on style, on elegance of conception and speech. I always had the feeling he was overly impressed with the British. I had a feeling that the work wasn’t coming out of Albee. Now the things that did come out of him, work that genuinely came out of him, like Virginia Woolf and The Zoo Story and the rest of them were really first class. It’s wonderful to see that he’s realized himself. That’s rare in anybody. He deserves much respect for that.
Poor Tennessee. He had the misfortune of being hooked, in effect, by drugs. He wasn’t himself I don’t know how many years. He was working on his nerve endings. Albee’s a terrific character. I think he’s very admirable.
MG: Along with you and Pinter, he’s been outspoken about human rights.
AM: For some period of time, if a writer got involved with human rights, people would say, why? [Hits the table.] Now if you’re not involved, they say, why isn’t he involved? The shifts in the culture, the changes in attitudes are remarkable. It all keeps coming around, coming around and going around. At a certain point in the ’50s, T. S. Eliot and that whole crew made it impossible to be talking about a writer having a social awareness. Suddenly, the ’60s came and blew it all away.
1 July 1998
‘Anybody who smears herself with chocolate needs all the support she can get’
Four American performance artists had had their grants revoked by the National Endowment for the Arts for reasons of censorship. Known as the NEA Four, they had taken their case to the United States Supreme Court, which, by a vote of eight to one, ruled against them and upheld a decency test for the awarding of federal grants in the arts. At the centre of the argument was Karen Finley, a performance artist who had made her strongest public impression by covering her partly nude body with chocolate to simulate excrement and symbolize the debasement of women. After the Supreme Court ruling, I called several artists for their reactions, among them Arthur Miller, who spoke first of all about his own brush with censorship.
AM: Twice in my life I faced charges of indecency. They were both a long time ago. In 1947, All My Sons opened in Boston and the Catholic Church condemned it because of a line: ‘A man can’t be a Jesus in this world.’ They forbade their members to see the play. When they did that, around the corner was the raunchies
t burlesque show of all.
The second time was when the Legion of Decency viewed The Misfits before it was released, and demanded certain changes. The main one was the scene in which Marilyn Monroe in a fit of despair walks out of the house and embraces a tree. To them, that represented masturbation.
This is the continuing, age-old argument between decency and the human body. It goes on and on. This time it’s especially obnoxious. Certain kinds of art will always be called indecent – and they need support. There we are back where we started. Anyone who smears herself with chocolate needs all the support she can get. If she covered herself in vanilla, they might not have been so outraged.
8 September 2000
Sometimes it takes a hundred years, and then you get it right’
In 2000, Miller turned eighty-five. A month before his birthday (on October 17) we met for lunch at the Beach Cafe, a restaurant near his Manhattan apartment. He was having another salutary year, with an acclaimed revival of All My Sons at the Royal National Theatre and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (starring Patrick Stewart) having moved from the Public Theatre to Broadway. Mr. Peter’s Connection, which had been a disappointment in its New York run at the Signature Theatre Company, had found a more conducive home at the Almeida Theatre in London. He was working on a new play, which was scheduled to be a part of the Signature’s tenth anniversary celebration of its house playwrights. He had just came from the Signature, where he had a round-table discussion with other Signature playwrights, Horton Foote, John Guare, Edward Albee and Maria Irene Fornes. We walked from his apartment to the restaurant. For the first time I noticed that Miller, who had been bothered by back problems, had a slight stoop.
AM: At the discussion I said at one point that it’s all very well to say that Off Broadway is functioning, but what do you do if you write The Crucible and you have a two-hundred-and-fifty-seat theatre with a stage about fourteen feet wide, and you’ve got to hire eighteen actors and have four sets. Are you settling for a chamber theatre?
MG: You’ve written a new play for the Signature?
AM: I don’t know what to do with it. The play is called Resurrection Blues. It’s not that it’s got a lot of people, but there’s something about it that wants to be in a bigger space. At the Signature the play would get diminished, but I’m not sure of that. A terrific designer could conquer a lot of the problems. The stage is quite shallow. Somehow there’s a lack of amplitude in that theatre. I may be wrong. Maybe it belongs there.
MG: Is there amplitude in the play?
AM: The play takes place in a place like Colombia. It should feel like you’re surrounded with desolate space.
MG: What’s it about?
AM: It’s about the threat of a return of a messiah. Gradually they all get absolutely terrified that it might be Him.
MG: Where did the play come from?
AM: Well, I spent some time in Colombia, but that’s not what the play’s about. It’s about American commercialism exploiting this whole thing, apart from the value of the Resurrection itself. A lot of the people in the country think this young guy is Him.
MG: Him being Christ?
AM: Yes. It’s a repressed peasantry. Gradually the audience – hopefully – will begin to believe it, too. He never appears.
MG: Wise choice.
AM: So we don’t have that casting problem. They want to do it at the Almeida. I just had a play there, Mr. Peters, and it’s now touring in England. They’re building a new building, which won’t be ready however until next May. The old theatre would have the same problem as this one, but the new theatre will be a real theatre. They found an enormous bus station which is no longer used, not far from the Almeida, and they’re going to transform it into two theatres.
MG: Did you see the Almeida’s two evenings of Shakespeare with Ralph Fiennes in the Gainsborough studios?
AM: I saw Coriolanus. It was terrific. I don’t see how else to do it other than the way they do it. Coriolanus arrives on the scene and he’s furious, and he never stops being furious. Jonathan Kent told me that Shakespeare’s mother died eight months before that play was produced. He wrote it after her death. The mother in that play is such a force. I wonder if it’s connected or not. You could make up a good subtext easily with that information.
So, I’m on the horns of a dilemma. I don’t know where to do the new play.
MG: You can’t just do it on Broadway?
AM: Nothing’s for Broadway! I mean nothing I would ever write would be on Broadway. The only hope to put anything on Broadway would be if it was a big hit somewhere else, and Gerry Schoenfeld [the head of the Shubert Organization] ran over there and exercised his great taste.
MG: In 1996 when we talked about the movie of The Crucible, you were discouraged about Broadway, but after that you had revivals there of Salesman and The Price.
AM: Both of those productions originated someplace else, The Price at Williamstown and Salesman at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. It may be that that’s the way it is now, for our lifetimes, that Broadway becomes a place for revivals, for near star revivals – excepting that the production of The Price was a strange beast. There were no stars in that that anybody would buy tickets for. It was very successful, until the Shubert Organization decided they wanted to put Copenhagen in that theatre. So they didn’t try to find another theatre.
MG: When Brian Dennehy did Salesman, he was not a box office star.
AM: I believe that there is an audience for plays, probably as good an audience as there ever was in my lifetime, but you can’t expect people coming in in droves at the prices we’re charging. It’s really more than anyone can expect. They’re going to go to the pure entertainment. When they were doing The Price and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, the official price was whatever it was, $60, but most of the tickets were sold for $45. So I said to the powers that be, well you guys believe in a free market, maybe that’s the price. If I manufacture an automobile and I want $100,000 for that automobile, you’re not going to sell as many as you would if you charged $40,000. They said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, they’ll pay for it.’ I said, ‘Well, they ain’t gonna.’ Of course, we’re in the hands of the real estate lawyers, and all that crap. It’s a hopeless situation. But I think the audience is there.
MG: With Mt. Morgan, of course, you had Patrick Stewart, who is a star.
AM: He was a star, but I wonder if he was a theatre star. I don’t think the audience connected him with drama; it was the personality.
MG: But you’ve had a lot of plays on recently.
AM: I personally haven’t got any complaint. But what we can’t do under these circumstances is to build up a core of mature actors and theatre people who are employed in the theatre. There a few people, a handful, who are prepared to act in theatre indefinitely, Phil Bosco, people like that. But I think you can count them on one or two hands, at most. So it’s a great situation for playwrights who are writing about very young people because young actors don’t have families yet. They don’t mind getting paid nothing. But if the guy’s a mature person with a family, he can’t do it, not for very long. It becomes a sort of fifth wheel to the entertainment wagon.
MG: The route you just took with Brian Dennehy and Salesman – from the Goodman Theatre to Broadway – is the proper way.
AM: Maybe that’s where we are. I resisted believing that for too long. I kept saying there must be a terrific Broadway producer the way there was, who would risk everything on a new show. Of course, I can understand part of it, because it originally cost $40,000 to put Salesman on, and if you and your relatives anted up $2000 apiece you could raise it. But you can’t raise a million and a half that way. You’ve got to get some real hard money.
MG: Tell me about your experience with the revival of All My Sons in London. What do they do differently?
AM: Well, for one thing, the set [in the Cottesloe Theatre] is a long lawn, real grass, a big swath of lawn, at one end of which is the façade of the house, the other end of which is lawn furnit
ure. The play is played on the earth. The audience surrounds the play.
MG: But you didn’t write it as an outdoor play.
AM: They do go into the backyard. It may be the configuration of that theatre. I don’t recall it being that way, but they fixed it up that way. All My Sons took place on the back porch and in the backyard. In a normal theatre, the house is upstage, and you have a downstage area, with a little arbor, and that’s it. This had a vastness to it; it really was like a Greek play. And it’s a small theatre. The audience is around it; they’re practically in it, and the impact of that is simply overwhelming. They had an actress, Julie Walters, who played it like a Jewish mother. She comes on and she’s already quite lively, filled with a kind of neurotic anxiety. The reasons are not given right away, but as the play proceeds that anxiety gets wilder and wilder and by the end she’s like Medea.
MG: Some years ago you talked about the London production of All My Sons with Rosemary Harris. You said that in that version, it was clearer from the beginning that the wife knew what her husband had done.
AM: Same thing now. She knows the story. She’s trying to control that explosion, because her contribution to the tension is immense. You sometimes don’t understand why she is that way. But it very rapidly unravels. I thought it was fantastic. The actors have this dynamic inside them because of the training.
MG: We’ve talked about your uncle Manny and his connection to Salesman.
AM: He was married to my mother’s sister. He always fascinated me, as he did everybody. Everybody used to deride him because he told such outlandish stories about himself and about others. He could never tell anything straight. What he said was always adorned with some completely impossible circumstance, like how much he sold in some place. Also his emotional life was very interesting because it was very sexual. He adored his wife in an open way that was not very common. They had been married about twenty-five years by the time I was conscious of them.
MG: He had two sons?
AM: He had two daughters, too. The eldest was a daughter, and the boys were tucked in the middle. That was the matrix, but it became something else. The dynamics of the play itself took over.