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By David Gates
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Back in the late '60s, Arthur Miller was on vacation in the Caribbean and spotted a man, standing ankle deep in the surf, who proved to be Mel Brooks. Now, in all of American theater, Brooks, for whom irreverent is too solemn a word, is as close as you'll find to the earnest Miller's evil twin. Brooks asked what he was up to, and Miller said he'd just finished a play called "The Price." What was it about? "Well," Miller began, "there are these two brothers--" "Stop!" Brooks yelled. "I'm crying!"
The beauty of it is, Miller told this story on himself. Despite his lofty public persona, there was nothing wrong with his sense of self-irony: he could see that to a Mel Brooks, working-class tragedy might seem like melodrama. It was just that Miller, however much his plays might be rooted in his own experience, had a notion of art that led him to aspire beyond the merely personal. "Great drama is great questions," he wrote in his autobiography, "or it is nothing but technique."
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Miller's plays, along with those of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, practically defined the American theater in the 20th century, when drama was still a central force in the culture. Two of those plays, at least, "Death of a Salesman" (1949) and "The Crucible" (1953), will be produced for as long as companies continue to do O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and Williams's "The Glass Menagerie"--even Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare.
But of course people will also continue to chew over his five-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Miller did. She was a recurring obsession in his later work: from "The Misfits," the screenplay he wrote for her in 1960, to "After the Fall" (1964) to last year's "Finishing the Picture." For Miller, as for many others, Monroe was the American Dream--a phrase he used with capital letters and no irony--in all its glamour and grief. He also loved her, and she proved a subject he could never quite get his head around. "With all her radiance," he wrote, "she was surrounded by a darkness that perplexed me." Even if posterity judges "After the Fall" no more kindly than contemporary critics did, Miller was fearless enough never to back away from a challenge--even one that might have been too big for him.
Miller's best work has improved with age, as its topical urgency fades to reveal an archetypal subtext. "The Crucible" no longer seems to be "about" McCarthyism in the allegorical guise of the Salem witch trials; now it's a tragedy of paranoia, repressed sexuality and group hysteria. And if Miller's people, particularly the striving salesman Willy Loman, have worn better than his grand themes, Miller was humble enough to know that how his work would be seen was the audience's decision, not his. "You do what you can do," he told an interviewer last year, "and the rest is up to the Zeitgeist."
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