The interview took place on 7 November 1983 in the playwright's New York City apartment near Central Park. Throughout our conversation, Miller spoke patiently and frankly about his work and modern drama in general. Eager to speak, Miller never stopped the conversation, not even while in the bathroom washing up, dressing for the evening, or walking the crowded streets later that evening. 

Photograph © Inge Morath,
Magnum Photos, Inc.  Used with permission.

                MR: Reflecting back upon five decades of playwriting, which plays hold the fondest memories for you?

                AM: Each play comes out of a quite different situation. Sometimes I feel proudest of The Crucible, because I made something lasting of a violent but brief turmoil, and I think it will go on for a while yet, throwing some light. It also happens to be my most produced play, incidentally. I also get a big kick out of The Price, especially the old man in that play. I still enjoy him, and that I created him.

                MR: Few American plays have exerted as much influence as Death of A Salesman. In terms of characterization, language, story, plot, and dramatic action, why do you think this play continues to engage audiences on a national as well as international level?

                AM: Maybe because it's a well-told, paradoxical story. It seems to catch the paradoxes of being alive in a technological civilization.style="mso-spacerun: yes">  In one way or another, different kinds of people, different classes of people apparently feel that they're in the play. Why that is I don't really know. But it seems to have more or less the same effect everywhere there is a dominating technology. Although it's also popular in places where life is far more pretechnological. Maybe it involves some of the most rudimentary elements in the civilizing process, family cohesion,- death and dying, parricide, rebirth, and so on. The elements, I guess, are rather fundamental. People feel these themes no matter where they are.

                MR: So you think that the plight of Willy and his family is as valid today as it was immediately after production?

                AM: Who knows? People tell me that Death of A Salesman is more pertinent now than then. The suppression of the individual by placing him below the imperious needs of the society or technology seems to have manufactured more Willys in the world. But again, it is also far more primitive than that. Like many myths and classical dramas, it is a story about violence within a family.

                MR: If Death of A Salesman is primitive in a Sophoclean sense, would you call it a tragedy?

                AM: I think it does engender tragic feelings, at least in a lot of people. Let's say it's one kind of tragedy. I'm not particularly eager to call it a tragedy or anything else; the label doesn't matter to me. But-when Aristotle was writing, there were various kinds of tragedy. He was trying to make definitions that would include most of them.      There are tremendous differences between an Ajax, Oedipus, the Theban Women, they’re all different and don’t meet Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in the same way. I suppose he was defining what he felt should be the ideal case.

                MR: Throughout much of your theater, you seem concerned with the notion of the American Dream, with its successes and failures. Could you discuss the influence of this Dream on your artistry?

                AM: The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out - the screen of the perfectibility of man. Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. Early on we all drink up certain claims to self-perfection that are absent in a large part of the world. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to man’s pretensions. The American idea is different in the sense that we think that if we could only touch it, and live by it, there’s a natural order in favor of us; and that the object of a good life is to get connected with that live and abundant order. And this forms a context of irony for the kind of stories we generally tell each other After all, the stories of most significant literary works are of one or another kind of failure. And it's a failure in relation to that screen. that backdrop. I think it pervades American writing, including my own. It’s there in The Crucible, in All My Sons, in After the Fall - an aspiration to an innocence that when defeated or frustrated can turn quite murderous, and we don't know what to do with this perversity; it never seems to "fit" us.

                MR: What is the relationship of form to content, and how have you arrived at the forms you've used in several of your plays which have a very inventive form - Death of A Salesman, After the Fall, which is almost cinematic, and the use of the narrator in A View From the Bridge. Did the form of these works come from the material or substance, or did the form come first? How does the creative process work for you?

                AM: I think there is a dialectic at work. There are forces working in two directions. The central reality in my plays is the lead character. In one or two of them it would be the leading characters, like Incident at Vichy where, while there is one most important character, many others are on almost an equal rank. But basically the story is carried forward by one individual wrestling with his dilemma. I'm not sure I understand what element it is in the dilemma that moves me toward one form or another. All My Sons was actually an exception to a dozen or so plays that I had written in previous years which most people don’t know about. Those were poetic plays; one or two were in verse; expressionist plays. Starting out I was never interested in being a “realistic” writer. I discovered the engine of the story at a certain point and All My Sons seemed a form that would best express it; and even though it was an unusual form for me to use, it best expressed what I was after, which was an ordinariness of the environment from which this extraordinary disaster was going to spring. The amoral nature of that environment; that is, people involved in cutting the lawn and painting the house and keeping the oil burner running; the petty business of life in the suburbs. So once I had that feeling about it, the form began to create itself. No, I am not really interested in “realism.” I never was. What I'm very much interested in is reality. This is something that can be quite different. Realism can conceal reality, perhaps a little easier than any other form, in fact. But what I am interested in is the poetic, the confluence of various forces in a surprising way; the reversals of man’s plans for himself; the role of fate, of myth, in his life; his beliefs in false things; his determination to tell the truth until it hurts, but not afterwards, and so on

                In an early play like All My Sons it was realism as we know realism; but I hope all my plays are realistic in the sense that the view of life is on the whole a useful not a trivial one. The form of Death of A Salesman was an attempt, as much as anything else, to convey the bending of time. There are two or three sorts of time in that play. One is social time; one is psychic time, the way we remember things; and the third one is the sense of time created by the play and shared by the audience. When I directed Salesman in China, which was the first time I had attempted to direct it from scratch, I became aware all over again that that play is taking place in the Greek unity of twenty-four hours; and yet, it is dealing with material that goes back probably twenty-five years. And it almost goes forward through Ben, who is dead. So time was an obsession for me at the moment, and I wanted a way of presenting it so that it became the fiber of the play, rather than being something that somebody comments about. In fact, there is very little comment verbally in Salesman about time. I also wanted a form that could sustain in itself the way we deal with crises, which is not to deal with them After all, there is a lot of comedy in Salesman; people forget it because it is so dark by the end of the play. But if you stand behind the audience you hear a lot of laughter. It’s a deadly ironical laughter most of the time, but it is a species of comedy. The comedy is really a way for Willy and others to put off the evil day, which is the thing we all do. I wanted that to happen and not be something talked about. I wanted the feeling to come across rather than a set of speeches about how we delay dealing with issues. I wanted a play, that is, that had almost a biological life of its own. It would be as incontrovertible as the musculature of the human body. Everything connecting with everything else, all of it working according to plan. No excesses. Nothing explaining itself; all of it simply inevitable, as one structure, as one corpus. All those feelings of a society falling to pieces which I had, still have, of being unable to deal with it, which we all know now. All of this, however, presented not with speeches in Salesman, but by putting together pieces of Willy's life, so that what we were deducing about it was the speech; what we were making of it was the moral of it; what it was doing to us rather than a romantic speech about facing death and living a fruitless life. All of these elements and many more went into the form of Death of A Salesman. All this could never have been contained in the form of All My Sons. For the story of Salesman is absurdly simple! It’s about a salesman and it’s his last day on the earth. There’s very little ongoing narrative. It’s all relationships. I wanted plenty of space in the play for people to confront each other with their feelings, rather than for people to advance the plot. So it became a very open form, and I believe a real invention. I initially titled it The Inside of His Head and had a set in mind, which I abandoned, of the inside of Willy’s skull in which he would be crawling around, playing these scenes inside of himself. Maybe that throws some -light on the kind of play I wanted it to be.

                In The Crucible, we see the fate of the society from a religious, moral point of view; its merged sublime and political powers forcing the transmission of a man's conscience to others, and then of the man’s final immortal need to take it back. In the area of morals and society it had to be a more explicit and “hard” play, hence its form. You know we adopt styles when we speak. When you’re speaking to your mother you speak in a different tone of voice from when you’re speaking to your class; you use different gestures when you speak to a friend and to the public; or to a policeman, or judge, or possibly a professor. So it’s the kind of address that the play is going to make that also creates its form. The address in The Crucible was an insistence, hardly concealed in the play, that if the events we see in that play are not understood it can mean the end of social life - which is based primarily on a certain amount of shared trust. And when the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself. So, saying this in The Crucible, what I believed at the time - the story of the Salem witch-hunt in 1692 - was indeed saying it wanted that form. An aseptic form; it’s less sensuous than Salesman. The Crucible is more pitiless, probably because power is at the bottom of it and because so much of the witch-hunt took place in a theocratic court. The witch-hunt was fundamentally a business of prosecutors and lawyers, witnesses, testimony. Literally the town of Salem did nothing anymore but attend court sessions in the church. It just about destroyed the town within the lifetime of those people.                       

                In each of my plays the central creating force is the character, be it John Proctor or Willy Loman or Mr. Kelly or whoever. If I haven’t got that, I haven’t got anything. And the form comes as a result of the texture of what I feel about that person. I felt about Willy Loman that he talked endlessly, and in the play he talks endlessly. He had to seem to ramble, and yet be accumulating an explosive force, which is what happens when someone’s talking a lot to himself and suddenly shoots himself. In After the Fall I wanted to confront somebody with his history, and rather than talk about it in a room in the third person, I wanted him to re-enact it. Maybe I can throw some light on After the Fall by saying this; it was done in India and the director came to see me and said that it had required no adaptation for the Indian theater Now that was kind of a shock to me. He said, “In the old Indian plays the god comes forth and re-enacts his incarnations.” And that’s, formally speaking, what happens in After the Fall: the various paths circle around the issues, which evolve into the person we finally see on the stage, striving toward a purer awareness of himself and the people in his life. To arrive at that it was necessary to break down some more walls of realistic theater.

                I've paid probably an inordinate amount of attention to form because if it’s not right, nothing works, no matter what. Form is literally the body that holds the soul of the play. And if that body doesn’t maneuver and operate, you have an effusion of dialogue, a tickling of the piano keys, improvisation, perhaps, but you don’t have music.

                MR: How much revision do you go through when composing a play?

                AM: Before I am finished with a play I have normally written about thousand to three-thousand pages. I suspect that in the case of After the Fall it may have been more. So obviously I'm searching around all over the place for what the play wants to be. I have a feeling that a play, if it truly exists, makes an a priori demand that it be born with certain shapes and certain features. Sculptors know that feeling: that within the rock is the sculpture, and what they're doing is knocking off the excess stone to find the ordained shape. What I do is go up one dead-end after another, picking up a little bit here and a little bit there until I discover where I ought to be and what it ought to look like. But, of course, the form depends a great deal upon how the play’s going to end. If it’s going to end in death, that has a tremendous effect on the way the play’s going to be structured. It tends to draw it up tight because it limits time automatically. Form is a way of expressing the tempo on the stage. If we could sit for twenty-five hours, which some of our playwrights would like us to do, we would hardly need any form at all. You would just go on and on and on, letting the audience pick what they wished out of the scrambled eggs. I've often said that the best naturalism you could achieve would be to put a tape recorder on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway and just leave it open! You would get a perfect absurd play, which would be interesting. I would contest that it isn’t a play, but that’s an academic point It’s not to my taste. Form is a choice, a selection of incident and feeling dictated by thematic considerations. That sounds like a definition! Maybe I better write that down!                   

                MR: A View From the Bridge was first written as a one-act play, then a two-act play, but in the process the role of the narrator/chorus shifted. That’s an unusual shift for you. Could you comment on this form-shift?             

                AM: This shift had to do with the circumstances of the play. That was a one-act play, in a time, incidentally, when you couldn’t get a one-act play produced in New York. There wasn’t an audience for one-act plays, so one wrote very few of them. But a friend of mine was in a Clifford Odets play - The Flowering Peach - which was failing on Broadway; He is Martin Ritt who later became a fine movie director. He called me one day and asked if I had any one-act plays because be had a cast of very good actors, and the producer was willing to let them use the theater on Sunday evenings to put on one-act plays. I didn’t have any, but I wasn’t doing anything and I thought, well, there was a story I’d known and loved for years but I could never figure out how to do a full-length play of it. So I said I’d try to do something, and I wrote A View From the Bridge in a week or two. That’s how it started out; it had always seemed to me to be a one-act play. The form was also influenced by my own curiosity as to whether we could in a contemporary theater deal with life in some way like the Greeks did. Meaning: that, unlike Salesman, it would not suck tons of water like a whale; everything that is said in the Greek classic play is going to advance the order, the theme, in manifest ways. There is no time for the character to reveal himself apart from thematic considerations. The Greeks never thought that art could be a crap-shoot. They thought art is form; a conscious but at the same time an inspired act. But anybody could be inspired; it was only the artist who had a conscious awareness of form, and this set him apart as the cultic, social voice. When I heard this story the first time - I never knew the man - it struck me even then how Greek it was. You knew from the first minute that it would be a disaster. Everybody around him of any intelligence would have told Eddie that it would be a disaster if he didn’t give up his obsession. But it’s the nature of the obsession that it can’t be given up. The obsession becomes more powerful than the individual that it inhabits, like a force from another world. That to me was interesting. So I began A View From the Bridge in its first version with the feeling that 1 would make one single constantly rising trajectory, until its fall, rather like an arrow shot from a bow; and this form would declare rather than conceal itself. I wanted to reveal the method nakedly to everybody so that from the beginning of the play we are to know that this man can’t make it, and yet might reveal himself somehow in his struggle. I must say the play was not cast in the best way; it had very good actors who didn’t belong; some actors couldn’t really handle the localized language, didn’t have the timbre or feeling for it. It failed. Peter Brook saw it and thought that I might have been too relentless in the sense that some of the life of the family, the neighborhood, had been squeezed out. So as soon as I started to let that life back in, especially the dilemma as seen by the wife, it began to expand itself and become a two-act play. It was done in England as such for the first time. That change, however, came from internal considerations. It came because I could see on the stage that I could give those actors more meat, and let the structure take care of itself a little bit. I relaxed the play in the sense of allowing it to have its colors.

                MR: Do you consider yourself a dramatic innovator?

                AM: I can only confess that the most completely achieved form that I know about is that of Death of A Salesman. This is to accommodate the full flow of inner and outer forces that are sucking this man. I daresay I made it all seem so natural that people have accepted it as real. But it’s the actors who understand the crush of condensation; they are, sometimes, at three places at the same time. The melting together of social time, personal time, and psychic time in Death of A Salesman is, for me, its unique power. I just directed it in China and it struck me all over again. I’ve always paid a great deal of attention to forms. I’ve never really written in the same-form twice. The only mode that I haven’t done much with, although a little of that too, is the absurd. But I did two one-act plays last year - Elegy For a Lady and Some Kind of Love Story - which are of a different form than I've ever tried before. Elegy For a Lady takes place in the space between the mind and what it imagines, and sort of turns itself inside out. Some Kind of Love Story concerns the question of how we believe truth, how one is forced by circumstance to believe what you are only sure is not too easily demonstrated as false. They were great fun to do, and were destroyed by the critics, but that doesn’t matter - they’ll be back one day.

                MR: Several of your plays have been done at one time and received one way, and done at a later period and received quite differently; I’m thinking especially of The Crucible, The Price, After the Fall. How do you account for the changes in the audience’s perception of the spectacle?

                AM: We have to remember that, maybe more than any other art, the play lacks independence as an artifact. It is a set of relationships. There really are no characters in plays; there are relationships. Where there are only characters and no relationships, we have an unsatisfactory play. A work has to be supported by its time. It’s an old story. A work can appear and the audience might not quite know what to make of it. They don’t get the clues the work is sending them. It’s a sociological and anthropological manifestation. The plays are not accessible to the audience. They haven’t tuned into it yet by virtue of their own experiences. Time goes by, and a thousand social developments, and they see differently; they see the same thing now, but with different eyes. When The Crucible opened, we were at the height of the McCarthy period. There was simply a lot of fear and suspicion in the audience. This has been said a thousand times; you know the story I’m sure. It was in many ways a disembodied theater. There was a fear of fear. Once they caught on to what The Crucible was about, a coat of ice formed over the audience because they felt they were being called upon to believe something which the reigning powers at the time told them they were not to believe. They would have to disobey very important social commands in order to believe in this play. Consequently the critics, who are merely registering their moment and, with few honorable exceptions, have no real independence from it, thought of The Crucible as a cold play. Now anyone who’s seen The Crucible can level criticism, but that surely isn’t a legitimate one anymore. It’s that they felt cold; they were refrigerated by the social climate of that moment. I stood in the back of that theater after opening night and I saw people come by me whom I’d known for years - and wouldn’t say hello to me. They were in dread that they would be identified with me. Because what I was saying in the play was that a species of hysteria had overtaken the United States and would end up killing people if it weren’t recognized. Two years passed. Senator McCarthy died, the pendulum swung, and people began to recognize that he had been a malevolent influence. Some felt a little bit of shame, some felt angry that they had been taken, and others felt he was right - even though he was wrong. In any case, the heat was off, And the play was done again off-Broadway in a production that in many ways really wasn’t as good as the original: the original had really fine, accomplished actors, and in the later one there was a much younger and more inexperienced cast. But the critics were overwhelmed with the play. That’s because they allowed the play into themselves, whereas before they were afraid to. They suspected it of being propaganda that they had to defend their virgin minds against.

                That was the most frightening change I have ever seen in the reception of a play, but of course there have been many other authors with similar fates. A play has to make an instantaneous connection with an audience made up of all sorts of people - some of them a little dumber than others. Some are smarter but less astute about the feelings they have. It’s a mixed audience. That they should all be brought to the same feeling by looking at one play is really remarkable. It’s almost too much to ask, but it happens all the time. A play’s an arrangement by which the author speaks for himself and for his audience at the same moment. And for that to happen obviously takes a lot of luck - and a certain small amount of skill and talent.

                MR: Reflecting upon Kate Keller in All My Sons, Elizabeth Procter in The Crucible, and say, Linda Loman in Death of A Salesman, could you discuss the roles the women play in your drama?

                AM: A production of All My Sons was on in England two years ago and was directed by Michael Blakemore, a very fine director, who had never seen it here. He saw Kate (Rosemary Harris) as a woman using the truth as a weapon against the man who had harmed their son. Kate Keller is pretty damn sure when the play begins that, in the widest sense of the word, Joe was “responsible” for the deaths of the Air Force men. She’s both warning him not to go down the road that his older son is beckoning him to go, and rather ambiguously destroying him with her knowledge of his crime. She sees the horror most clearly because she was a partner to it without having committed it. There’s a sinister side to her, in short. This actress caught it beautifully. The production was “dark” because of her performance of the mother who is usually regarded as ancillary, which she is not.

                MR: Perhaps, then, there’s more complexity to your female characters than critics have generally recognized.

             AM: Critics generally see them as far more passive than they are. When I directed Salesman in China, I had Linda “in action.” She’s not just sitting around. She’s the one who knows from the beginning of the play that Willy’s trying to kill himself. She’s got the vital information all the time. Linda sustains the illusion because that’s the only way Willy can be sustained. At the same time any cure or change is impossible in Willy. Ironically she’s helping to guarantee that Willy will never recover from his illusion. She has to support it; she has no alternative, given his nature and hers.

                MR: So, in this context, Linda is supporting what Ibsen would call a “vital lie.”

                AM: That’s right. The women characters in my plays are very complex. They’ve been played somewhat sentimentally, but that isn’t the way they were intended. There is a more sinister side to the women characters in my plays. These women are of necessity auxiliaries to the action, which is carried by the male characters. But they both receive the benefits of the male’s mistakes and protect his mistakes in crazy ways. They are forced to do that. So the females are victims as well.     

                MR: Do you try to get members of the audience to confront themselves and others about key issues?

                AM: I am not a teacher in the theater, despite what you may have read. In the sense that a lesson is arranged on the stage that will give us a certain moral. The play is really an attempt to order life. Now I’m more than happy when people do arrange themselves on one side or the other of the argument of the play. And I think it may do their brain some good to move away from the anguish of daily chaos. But the theater is not an educational institution, certainly not primarily. If a play makes them feel more alive, it is more than enough.

                MR: Regarding your adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. In the Preface you discuss some of the reasons for producing another version of Ibsen’s work in terms of style, language, and so on. In light of the politics as well as the aesthetics of that play, can you discuss the different nature of “your” play - especially, since it’s so different a production for you personally.

                AM: Let me tell you how it started. Early in 1951 Frederic March and Robert Lewis came to me - they wanted me to do An Enemy of the People. The versions that existed in English were very stiff, ungainly, and they didn’t think they could do them. This might throw a little light on our theater history; at this time there was no off-Broadway theater. You had to do this on Broadway, complete with the usual Broadway merchandise. What they were interested in was some response to the crucifying of left-wingers. March and his wife were in the midst of a lawsuit against someone who had accused them of being pro-communist. He was looking for some play which would clarify the principle behind his stand, and he found it in An Enemy of the People. I had never seen the play acted. Reading it again I thought it would be a hell of a thing to do; the backer was a very wealthy young Norwegian who had a lot of love for the United States and was worried that it was turning fascist. He offered to supply me with a careful, word-for-word translation of Ibsen’s original manuscript, done by him. It would simply set each word next to each word; there would be no attempt to write English, and, as you know, any foreign language translated that way is really not a language but a set of disconnected wooden blocks. So with that I wrote a version of the play, trying to generate some contemporary feeling. It was not to be a museum piece. It was to threaten us! The play was a very threatening play in its time. I had to reproduce that feeling of threat. You couldn’t do it with the other language. It was basically a question of language. Also, the play is monstrously repetitive. Ibsen, in his later years, couldn’t remember having written it! He had done it very quickly - in a few months - in response to violent criticism of him for Ghosts. He was portrayed as a pornographer, a dreadful anti-social mechanic. He wrote this as a self-defense, based on the idea fundamental to the play, as I saw it: that before many people can know something one man has to know it. The majority in that sense is always wrong, always trailing behind that one man.

                So do I feel the play’s “mine?” Not really. Perhaps some of its humor, and a certain quickened throb not in the original. In any case before 1 did it, it was hardly ever produced here except by academic circles. Afterwards, it was put on fairly often, and still is because I made the play more accessible, I believe, to a contemporary audience. The original, for example, had long and arid debates about Darwinian questions which have been settled and nobody’s particularly interested in anymore. Some of Ibsen’s ideas seemed crackpot even then, however. He had in fact to go around explaining, especially to trade union meetings where he made speeches, that he hadn’t intended to say that he believed in the superiority of an aristocracy. The play could lend itself to supporting the idea that an elite should be running the world because the average guy is rather an idiot, as he often is. But he was talking about the aristocracy of the intellect and the spirit. Meaning those people who are prepared to disinterestedly venture into the future. They have to sacrifice for it, and they should be somehow protected so that they’re not lost to society. But “An Enemy of the People” doesn’t quite say that. In the original version, it often sounds merely contemptuous of the ordinary citizen. But, on the other hand, maybe Ibsen really was.

                MR: Earlier you commented that the central character often helps give shape or form to your play; but have you ever written a piece that was generated from a compelling thematic issue?

                AM: Incident at Vichy is the closest I’ve ever come to that. The action originated from an actual event involving a group of men in Vichy, France. Incidentally, there’s a man who’s recently been arrested, Klaus Barbie, who ran the Gestapo in France; it was he who was running the program that I depicted in “Incident at Vichy:” the Germans hunting down Jewish people in the Vichy zone who were masquerading as French in order to escape the concentration camps. Barbie invented a lot of procedures. I’m very happy to say that in the play, written sometime in the ‘60s, one of the characters says, “These aren’t the Germans, these are the French Police.” And that’s exactly where things are now. That is, yes, a thematic play. There’s another element in Incident in Vichy, without which I wouldn’t have written the play; that is, the time comes when somebody has to decide to sacrifice himself, and the act of sacrifice was interesting to me. And really the play comes down to that, the step from guilt to responsibility and action.

                MR: When working with a director on a play, do you make many changes in the rehearsal procedure?

                AM: I have, and most of the time to the detriment to the play. I’ll tell you what happens. I’ve worked on Broadway where there’s a very limited amount of time; three-and-a-half weeks and you’re on. And we’re dealing with a lot of overdone commercialization. And it costs a lot of money per day, so naturally you limit the day. The result? The power that now moves from the playwright to the director is inevitable because he’s got to bring that curtain up. Sometimes, if I have a particularly sensitive and able director, this doesn’t happen. But when you have a less than capable man, you have to make it possible for him to put that play on. So the playwright starts making up for his weaknesses. The playwright also has to consider what to do about actors who can’t really sing on the pitch in which you wrote the music. The alternative is to let it stand there and know that they don’t have a prayer: they can’t hit certain notes and you’ve got to change the register. We have a very poor theater now, I’m afraid. It’s poor in time: our theater doesn’t have sufficient time to really stop and work on a difficult passage. Instead, the playwright is thrown the job of making the actor’s or director’s job pleasant, while at the same time protecting and defending his own work, as much as he can. Sometimes these things are contradictory and you don’t always succeed. I’ve had that happen; there’s hardly a playwright who hasn’t from the beginning of time.

                MR: Given all the economic, social, thematic, political, and aesthetic considerations that go into our theater today, and given all the problems our theater is facing today, what should or could or can theater be, and what in an ideal world should our theater try to accomplish?

                AM: Well, that’s a pretty big order. I think that a theater with the most vitality is a theater that confronts an audience made up of the whole people. We don’t have anything like that. This is not merely a sentimentally democratic statement. When you break up society, as our theater audience largely does, into a very tiny fragment of the most well-to-do, it can only react in a certain way. I know when I go to Minneapolis or Dayton, there’s a different atmosphere between the play and the people, because it costs next to nothing to get in - at least when compared to New York prices. A much wider group of people is in the theater, and I find this very stimulating. You see, Shakespeare had to address nobility, along with people who couldn’t read and write; the whole gamut of society was in the theater, and that supported and invited the tremendous variety in his plays. As social and political revolutions took place in England after his passing, the audience got a more and more narrowly bourgeois ideological slant; it couldn’t open itself to contradictions of its ideology. So the more you narrow your audience the more you narrow the plays that serve it. The mechanics of it are quite obvious; if you hand a producer a piece that offends a significant portion of the Broadway audience, not to speak of the critics, he’ll think two or three times before putting it on. You are in that way bound to one level of consciousness. It’s not a new thing; my argument with our theater on that level is that it’s constricted to a degree greater than I have ever known in my lifetime. It is very important that people not have to pay $40 to get into the theater, because if they pay $40, they’re probably not going to want what I am writing.                

                Another element in a great theater is that it tried to place aesthetics at the service of its civic function. See how the plays that we call great have made us somehow more civilized. The great Greek plays taught the western mind the law. They taught the western mind how to settle tribal conflicts without murdering each other. The great Shakespearean plays set up structures of order which became parts of our mental equipment. In the immense love stories, the wonderful comedies, there’s all sorts of color. But back of these great plays is a civic function. - The author was really a poet-philosopher. A forty-dollar ticket brooks no philosophies, tends toward triviality. I believe that if we had some means of expanding our audience it would take awhile but playwrights would respond to that challenge. They’d smell blood out there!

                The biggest reason playwriting is in such dire straits is because the; it’s not there anymore. We’ve been talking about this for thirty years. Back in the early fifties I even got the Dramatists Guild to convene a meeting of playwrights, unions, and producers to try to reduce our take and lower our costs. That was over thirty years ago, when it was $10 or $8, something like that, for a ticket. But I saw it happening. I saw friends of mine who could no longer go to the theater. People who loved the theater. They didn't have the money. There are places in the world where this problem, if not solved, has been dealt with, steps have been taken. One of them is England. The National Theatre; the Arts-Council in England. That’s one of the reasons there have been so many English plays around. There’s an English audience for those plays. A writer might not be able to make a good living at it, but he could feed himself on a play that was written, not for the West End, not for Broadway, but for those three or four weeks of performances that he might get with very good actors. This is not amateur theater. Some of the best people in England are involved in this. So my great theater would be a poetic theater. It would have to be because once you’re confronted with the Great Unwashed, well, the only image I have is when you go to a prize fight, a ball game, or a political rally. I was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention, and there was the American people. That’s the audience I wish I had. You know: real ugly toughs from Chicago, professors from Massachusetts, southern crackers from Georgia, Alabama. I could talk to those people. But I can’t get ‘em! They’re not in my theater. And if they ever got into the theater, you would have something! You would have fever!

From Michigan Quarterly Review 24 (1985): 373-389
Reprinted by permission.

Arthur Miller photograph © Inge Morath,
Magnum Photos, Inc.  Used with permission