Arthur Miller

The opportunity of seeing and hearing one of the most important living dramatists drew a large collection of young theater enthusiasts to the Boston University School of Drama last week. Appearing very much at home with his horned-rimmed glasses and quiet, thoughtful manner, Arthur Miller launched into a plea for a new American Theater. Echoing the arguments of William Saroyan and others, Miller said that Broadway suffers from too much commercialism. The huge cost of producing a show, he pointed out, places an author under stifling pressure. The writer's reputation as a money maker, and therefore his future, hinges on every play that comes before the public, causing him to be cautious and afraid to experiment. In contrast to this, Miller described the feeling of freedom and sheer joy that he had experienced in the writing of his new pair of plays, A View From the Bridge.

Going into the background of these new works, Miller explained that he had written them at the request of a friend who had asked for a one-act play that a small, New York drama group could perform for one or two nights. Since small works of this kind were not usually done on Broadway, he agreed to finish a one-act play on which he was working and to write a second one as a curtain-raiser. In the end the plays turned out to be good enough to rank as a major attraction of the new theater season.

Miller explained some of the details that makes the second of these plays different from his earlier works as well as from contemporary realism. He used the technique of the Greek Drama, in this case substituting a narrator for the chorus, to heighten the dramatic effect. While the play is going on, Miller said, the audience is directed to the important conflicts and made to realize that they are not looking in on real life, as in Death of a Salesman, but are watching a frankly convention-bound art form. This signifies an attempt on his part to strike out in a new direction--away from Realism, which he believes has reached a point of stagnation after seventy-five years. The Crucible similarly attempted by the use of stylized speech to lead away from the limits of realism. In the future Miller believes, a form of verse-drama will replace the use of realistic dialogue.

It became clear during the question period that the second of the new plays follows a particular idea of tragedy. In answer to Elliot Norton, Miller explained that he believes Hamlet and Oedipus are the two greatest tragedies ever written, although not the best constructed, because they are based on the generally tabooed psychology of the family situation. In his own writing, he said, all men are capable of being tragic characters, regardless of their position in society, since they are all part of a family group. And in the psychological sense, all share feelings of patricide and other unconscious desires. The success of his writing, he concluded, lies in the extent to which he unearths these unconscious feelings and so involves his audience. His feeling of saying something important, he confessed, comes only when he himself feels embarrassment. He added that the movie, Death of a Salesman, avoids the delicate areas, and as a result he felt it has lost its essential meaning.