A crucible of his own

NEW YORK —  Arthur Miller is folded onto an unexceptional sofa in his modest one-bedroom on a middling floor of a big, old, unremarkable building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. America’s great playwright of conscience is taller than expected, a craggy monument of a man with thigh bones that could be baseball bats and forearms that hang from his soiled peach polo shirt like remnants of an adolescent growth spurt.

“I can’t really find myself at home in an apartment,” he says, explaining how he and his third wife, photographer Inge Morath, bought this place in the ‘80s, when hotel rates “got to be crazy.” Morath, his soul mate of 40 years, died of lymphoma in 2002, but Miller still lives mainly in Roxbury, Conn., on the 350 acres he bought during his tumultuous five-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The place is not far from the house he bought in 1947 with money from his first Broadway success, “All My Sons.”

By actuarial and theatrical tabulations, this should not be a creative time for an icon who had his biggest hits more than half a century ago. But Miller, after decades of honor abroad and neglect at home, is enjoying a reenergized career that is uncommon in a land so proud of its limited attention span.

“There is a kind of zeitgeist, a spirit of the moment. I have no way of knowing why,” he says in that cranky but bemused voice that, for all his international reach, never gets far from the sound of Brooklyn.

But here he sits, apparently unfazed by the specter of his 90th birthday in 2005, with a major new play about Hollywood called “Finishing the Picture” opening at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in the fall and a rare revival of perhaps his most controversial work, “After the Fall,” now at the Roundabout Theatre. He is one short story away from a collection. He is also editing his diaries -- all the way back to the ‘40s -- for publication. Equally reassuring, his political antennae are as sensitive as ever.

There’s also a new woman in his life, a 33-year-old artist named Agnes Barley. The apartment is in the throes of a paint job; a few things are being tossed. Miller can’t hear the phone ring without the hearing aids he keeps yanking out of his ears. But clearly, he has no intention of resting on the shelf with his lifetime achievement awards.

Broadway has recently seen triumphant revivals of both of his masterworks: “Death of a Salesman” in 1999, 50 years after it earned the Pulitzer Prize, and “The Crucible” barely six months after Sept. 11, 2001, which eerily connected the Puritan witch trials, anticommunist hysteria and paranoia about terrorists. In 2001, a chilling movie adaptation of “Focus,” Miller’s 1945 novel about anti-Semitism in Brooklyn during World War II, reminded us that racial profiling is not a new offense.

Even now, however, Broadway is less interested in Miller’s daring new plays than in revivals of his greatest hits. “Resurrection Blues,” a satire about dictatorship and the media, opened at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2002 and was restaged at other regional theaters but has never been seen in New York. “There’s a production floating around, but I can’t talk about it,” he says with conspiratorial sarcasm.

“Our theater is now about musicals,” he says, without trying to hide his bitterness. “Theater got itself involved in high-cost entertainment. It needs to go back to the simplest milieu -- because you can’t compete with the excitement of movies. The distortion of the art is to please the so-called theatrical majority.... The production people go for the lowest common denominator because they’re so desperate not to lose a million dollars. Without subsidies of some kind, this distortion is going to go to the bitter end.”

Two years ago, the Roundabout Theatre did a first-rate production of Miller’s “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” which flopped after four performances in 1944 and temporarily drove the struggling writer from the theater. This season, the Roundabout opened “After the Fall,” his 1964 psychodrama about personal responsibility, ‘50s redbaiting, shadows of the Holocaust and women much like the ones haunting this playwright’s own life.

Joe Dowling, artistic director of the Guthrie, is staging another “Salesman” in Minneapolis this month, then will take it to Dublin, Ireland, where Miller’s American Dream tragedies are revered (and not far from where Miller’s daughter Rebecca, a fiction writer, lives with her husband, actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Miller’s other daughter, Jane, a weaver, lives in Connecticut, and son, Robert, who produced the movie version of “The Crucible,” lives in California).

Just as important as the revivals are the new plays: such works as the exuberantly sexual “A Ride Down Mt. Morgan” of 1991 (which might become a movie with Michael Douglas as the unrepentant bigamist) and the beguiling smart-old-man rumination, “Mr. Peters’ Connections,” which had its world premiere during the Signature Theatre’s all-Miller season in 1998.

Miller is heavy into preparations for “Finishing the Picture,” which begins previews Sept. 21 at the Goodman with a cast that includes Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin and Matthew Modine. There are no plans for a New York transfer. “You’d never know we’re working with an icon. He can’t help being Arthur Miller, of course, but he rolls up his sleeves and involves himself in every aspect,” said its director, Robert Falls, who oversaw the 1999 “Salesman.”

Miller describes “Finishing the Picture” as “the attempt to complete a film where one of the stars has collapsed. Her power is such that, inevitably, the whole thing screeches to a halt. It’s a study of all the people surrounding the event, the personal and social forces involved in getting her started again.” Any relation between the star’s condition and, say, that of Monroe -- “whacked-out, depressed, pill-popping,” in Falls’ words -- during the 1961 filming of Miller’s screenplay for “The Misfits” is, well, not considered polite conversation. (At 80, Miller hit a New York reporter who asked him about Monroe.) The new play, Miller says, is in no way a companion piece to “After the Fall,” which he has always insisted is no more autobiographical than his other plays.

Still, it is hard not to wonder how it feels to revisit those very public, intimate years and the maybe-Marilyn play the press attacked him for writing. “Well,” he answers without really answering, “it’s always strange, because the author’s got his own connections with the material and they’re all sort of exhumed. But I’m always pleased that I recorded what I felt at that time, because I would never remember the attitudes I had toward things. Life is mostly forgetting, and the art is the memory. It’s strange that way.”

Current worldview

Oddly enough, rereading his diaries has left him more optimistic about the country than about the theater.

“There always has been an uneasy relationship between the people and the government,” explained the man who was issued a 1957 contempt citation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (overturned the next year by the U.S. Court of Appeals), who protested torture in Turkey in 1985 and who fought for artists’ civil liberties as the longtime president of PEN, the international writers’ organization.

“People look back at World War II as the good war, which it was in the sense that it got rid of Hitler. But the country was profoundly divided about that war, hatefully divided. Despair was everywhere. The end of the world had come.” Then the Vietnam War “broke the country in half” again. “So it gives you some hope that, maybe, that’s the way we move -- like some sort of inchworm, spreading out and contracting.”

Miller and his wife were in Paris when the World Trade Center was destroyed. “People -- strangers -- would come over to me and commiserate about it. The love for this country in Paris, which is not usually in love with anybody.... There was no joy that the great giant had been wounded.

“Within six months, these guys [in Washington] managed to turn that around and make us the most despised, suspected and hated country on Earth. I don’t recall a time when there was less simple responsibility by the government for what it says and what it does. It has managed to cover itself with blah, blah, blah to the point where nobody knows what to think about most things. And the press has been amazingly supportive of that.”

Miller believes the worst may be over in Iraq, that a draft could force an end to the fighting. Still, he is appalled at what he calls the government’s “blatancy. It’s so obvious it’s painful. It’s bad acting.”

The playwright has a tradition of biting hands that honor him. Invited to give a lecture by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001, he delivered “On Politics and the Art of Acting.” Published a year later as a book, it gives a scathing analysis of the acting styles of presidents Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush in a society whose voters have a “glandular reaction to a leader’s personality.”

Invited last year to accept the Jerusalem Prize honoring literary achievements regarding freedom of the individual in society, he declared that “a new birth of a humanistic vision is necessary if the Jewish presence is to be seen as worth preserving.... Without justice at its center, no state can endure as a representation of the Jewish nature.”

“Well,” he says, with wry understatement, “People ask you to say something, I feel you ought to say something. Otherwise, shut up.”

Mantle of the Depression

It is not hard to imagine the social playwright as a boy, born into privilege on 113th Street and 3rd Avenue, then dislocated to Brooklyn when his father lost his women’s coat business during the Depression. The scent of disappointment permeates so many of Miller’s characters: the loyal, failing men and the wives with mysterious existential upheavals.

As a teenager, he was electrified by a production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” -- a play about syphilis -- in Brighton Beach, starring Alla Nazimova. “It didn’t seem possible to write a play that could impact in that way,” says the man often called “America’s Ibsen.”

He worked in warehouses so he could go to college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “I wanted to go to a quiet place and study. New York was in such turmoil; unemployment was unbelievable. My brother had a friend who had gone there and told me about prizes for undergraduate writers. Tuition was $65 a year. Columbia was $300 or $400. I didn’t dare think I could actually write. I had no right to think so, but I had fallen in love with the idea.”

For all his ongoing concerns, he sees the Depression as his defining event. “Someone has said that the Depression and the Civil War were the only two national events in American history. World War I involved a handful of Americans, and World War II was far away. But the Depression affected everybody, and they knew at the time that it was affecting them.”

Is that how he became a mass playwright in an art that isn’t a mass art?

“When I finally thought of myself as a playwright,” he says, “the American theater had hardly any of what we now call off-Broadway stuff, here or in the rest of the country. So you conceived of yourself as a playwright for what was then the masses. Of course, they weren’t the masses, but it was as close as we got. You could go to the theater and sit next to a cop or a fireman or a teacher or somebody who made a low salary. You could get seats for 55 cents in the balcony. It was within reason for ordinary people.

“Being a playwright meant that you were talking to the public. Now we’re supposed to talk to what’s called a ‘theater audience.’ I don’t know what that is, but it’s not the idea of a big public. My voice is always pitched toward most people. Look to the greatest playwright in the English language. Shakespeare was certainly not directing his work to a clique or a small group of like-minded people. You expected to confront opposition, as any public speaker would expect. It was public speech.”

He blames ticket prices, of course. “There’s no subsidy. Every British playwright you’ve ever heard about has come out of the subsidized theaters. None has come from a commercial theater.” He also realizes the effects of TV and movies. “Before the mid-’50s, you weren’t surprised to find really top-level actors in secondary parts, which gave strength to Tennessee Williams’ plays and my plays and others. Now you’re competing most of the time with television salaries, which you can’t expect an actor to forgo.”

The Guthrie’s Dowling is incredulous at Broadway’s attitude toward new work by Miller. “If Tom Stoppard or Harold Pinter wrote a play, it would be automatically produced in London,” he asserts. “Miller never set boundaries in his exploration, his commitment to new forms. Who wouldn’t want to hear his views?”

Asked if things would be different if America had had a national theater, Miller deflects the personal disillusionment by talking about Marlon Brando. “An actor like him -- not that there was anybody like him -- wouldn’t have ended up quite as unhappy as he was. He would have played all the great kingly roles and the 18th century farces. He would have branched out and become a real actor instead of simply a public figure.

“There’s a long roster of accomplished British actors who got behind dozens of roles that our actors never get a chance to do. Brando could have divided his life easily. He had no family, really. I don’t think he ever had a home. He lived where he lived. And he wasted ... this system wasted maybe the greatest actor of the 20th century.”

Miller pauses to consider what he might have done if he were not a writer. He still has the hands of a carpenter, having built much on the Roxbury property. Last month, the place was struck by lightning.

“It didn’t start a fire, thank God,” he says, loping back to the couch after a phone consultation with the insurance company. “But it blew out the computer and lights and pumps and God knows what. Millions of volts ... but everything’s OK.”

“OK” doesn’t begin to cover it.