January 23, 1964 —The latest drama of guilt and personal responsibility from Arthur Miller, After the Fall, starring Jason Robards, Jr. and Barbara Loden (pictured with the playwright here), opened at Lincoln Center. The production quickly became swallowed up in controversy—like so much of the playwright’s life to this point, as much for political as personal reasons.
The tragedy marked the first time in over a decade that Miller had worked with Elia Kazan, the director who had not only influenced a generation of more naturalistic theater and film actors but had also shepherded two of Miller’s key plays onto the stage: All My Sons and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman. But the two friends’ opposing decisions on “naming names” before Congress at the height of the Hollywood red scare—Kazan acquiescing, Miller defying—fractured their friendship.
But the two former friends came together to collaborate on the inaugural production of a new repertory theater then being installed at Lincoln Center. Surmounting their disagreements over politics—and disregarding in particular those who claimed that “friendly witnesses” before HUAC should be professionally shunned—Miller and Kazan came together over a play that, for all its traditional Milleresque musings on responsibility, the Holocaust, and the obligations of marriage and family, also featured at its center a thinly veiled version of the woman who had been lover to Kazan and wife to Miller—Marilyn Monroe.
The news of Monroe’s death came as Miller was finishing After the Fall. Inevitably, given the open wounds of a marriage that had collapsed during the disastrous filming of The Misfits, the central situation of the play—a fortysomething angst-ridden liberal, “Quentin,” confronts a past that includes his blacklisting and his failed marriage to a substance-abusing entertainer, “Maggie”—was inspired by the relationship between the playwright and Monroe.
But the decision of the actress playing Maggie, Barbara Loden, to wear a blonde wig sealed the identification with America’s recently deceased sex symbol, to the near-total exclusion of the play’s nettlesome themes and challenging dramaturgy, including the spartan setting and the non-linear plot.
More than twenty years after its premiere, Miller was still bitter in reflecting on the play’s reception in his autobiography, Timebends: “With a few stubborn exceptions the reviews were about a scandal, not a play, with barely a mention of any theme, dramatic intention, or style, as though it were simply an attack on a dead woman.”
I first became aware of the play ten years later, in the midst of discovering his other dramas, in a 1974 TV production that included Christopher Plummer as Quentin, Faye Dunaway as Maggie, and a pre-Lou Grant and pre-Sopranos Nancy Merchand as Quentin’s mother.
Other attempts have been made to mount the play, including one by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Co. and, in a remarkable attempt to free it from the link to Monroe, a 1990 Royal National Theatre production in London that featured, as Maggie, a black actress, Josette Simon. But, with the legend of Monroe burning brighter with every year, the play remains a handful for any director and cast.
Monroe’s bewitching of one male after another is astonishing, and not only because she intrigues gays as much as heterosexuals. (Think of Andy Warhol’s pop art paintings of the star, or Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” tribute to “Norma Jean.”)
She also led an American statesman (and, possibly, his Attorney-General brother) to flirt with disaster by engaging in an affair; she led a proud ex-ballplayer ex-husband to contemplate wedding her again after her divorce from Miller came through; and she led a prize-winning novelist (Norman Mailer) into one of the most embarrassing books of his career, a dissection of the meaning of her life.
But the male she may have transfixed the most was Miller, for he ended up writing about her a second time, in what turned out to be his last production, Finishing the Picture.
I saw this play—an even more thinly veiled fictionalization of their crumbling relationship than After the Fall, occurring on the troubled set of The Misfits—not long after it premiered in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in October 2004. It was hard to resist getting a ticket for a show starring Matthew Modine, Stephen Lang, Harris Yulin, Frances Fisher, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin, and Scott Glenn.
The play moved along at a brisk pace, and, particularly with Lang and Lavin playing characters based on Actors Studio head Lee Strasberg and his wife Paula, included large doses of uncharacteristic and highly welcome humor from Miller. Moreover, it spotlights a dilemma omnipresent on nearly every film: the presence of insurance companies that can derail a production if a star becomes incapacitated or dies.
But one aspect of the play was disturbing: the character at the center of this turmoil is always seen in the most distressing of circumstances—running across the darkened stage naked in those moments when she wasn’t moaning in a drug- or alcohol-induced stupor. In fact, I can’t recall the Monroe character uttering a single intelligible syllable the whole night. It was as if Miller could not even allow his ex-wife a voice.
Terry Teachout, a prolific cultural critic whose blog has served as an inspiration for mine, dissents from the notion of Miller’s greatness that has prevailed once again after a mid-career fall from critical favor. In turn, I take issue with Teachout: Miller’s intense concentration on the family and personal failings as the source of tragedy—not one’s place in society—reinvented it for modern audiences without losing elements that had bound audiences from the Greeks to the present day.
The great irony of the playwright’s later life might have been that he never commented publicly—and only at the very end came to grips privately—with the tragedy of his post-After the Fall years: the 1966 birth of his son Daniel, stricken with Down’s syndrome.
Though it had been an open secret among his inner circle for awhile, a Vanity Fair article from this past fall led to much consternation in the blogosphere—especially over the notion that the wife Miller married after his divorce from Monroe, photographer Inge Morath, wanted to keep the baby.
Miller, however, was determined to keep it out of his life. Eventually the baby was placed in a Connecticut mental institution, where he remained for 17 years, under appalling conditions. The playwright never spoke of this fourth child and never mentioned him at all in Timebends.
Remarkable, once removed from the facility, Daniel improved and even thrived. In his last decade, Miller finally began meeting occasionally with his son, and, to his credit, changed his will shortly before his death so that his son might have a stake in the estate.
But one wonders about the psychic toll his longtime abandonment of his son took on the playwright. Miller’s creative output began to decline later in the decade, not long after the birth of his child—an ironic development in the life of a playwright whose work returns obsessively to the theme of fathers and sons.
The tragedy marked the first time in over a decade that Miller had worked with Elia Kazan, the director who had not only influenced a generation of more naturalistic theater and film actors but had also shepherded two of Miller’s key plays onto the stage: All My Sons and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman. But the two friends’ opposing decisions on “naming names” before Congress at the height of the Hollywood red scare—Kazan acquiescing, Miller defying—fractured their friendship.
But the two former friends came together to collaborate on the inaugural production of a new repertory theater then being installed at Lincoln Center. Surmounting their disagreements over politics—and disregarding in particular those who claimed that “friendly witnesses” before HUAC should be professionally shunned—Miller and Kazan came together over a play that, for all its traditional Milleresque musings on responsibility, the Holocaust, and the obligations of marriage and family, also featured at its center a thinly veiled version of the woman who had been lover to Kazan and wife to Miller—Marilyn Monroe.
The news of Monroe’s death came as Miller was finishing After the Fall. Inevitably, given the open wounds of a marriage that had collapsed during the disastrous filming of The Misfits, the central situation of the play—a fortysomething angst-ridden liberal, “Quentin,” confronts a past that includes his blacklisting and his failed marriage to a substance-abusing entertainer, “Maggie”—was inspired by the relationship between the playwright and Monroe.
But the decision of the actress playing Maggie, Barbara Loden, to wear a blonde wig sealed the identification with America’s recently deceased sex symbol, to the near-total exclusion of the play’s nettlesome themes and challenging dramaturgy, including the spartan setting and the non-linear plot.
More than twenty years after its premiere, Miller was still bitter in reflecting on the play’s reception in his autobiography, Timebends: “With a few stubborn exceptions the reviews were about a scandal, not a play, with barely a mention of any theme, dramatic intention, or style, as though it were simply an attack on a dead woman.”
I first became aware of the play ten years later, in the midst of discovering his other dramas, in a 1974 TV production that included Christopher Plummer as Quentin, Faye Dunaway as Maggie, and a pre-Lou Grant and pre-Sopranos Nancy Merchand as Quentin’s mother.
Other attempts have been made to mount the play, including one by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Co. and, in a remarkable attempt to free it from the link to Monroe, a 1990 Royal National Theatre production in London that featured, as Maggie, a black actress, Josette Simon. But, with the legend of Monroe burning brighter with every year, the play remains a handful for any director and cast.
Monroe’s bewitching of one male after another is astonishing, and not only because she intrigues gays as much as heterosexuals. (Think of Andy Warhol’s pop art paintings of the star, or Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” tribute to “Norma Jean.”)
She also led an American statesman (and, possibly, his Attorney-General brother) to flirt with disaster by engaging in an affair; she led a proud ex-ballplayer ex-husband to contemplate wedding her again after her divorce from Miller came through; and she led a prize-winning novelist (Norman Mailer) into one of the most embarrassing books of his career, a dissection of the meaning of her life.
But the male she may have transfixed the most was Miller, for he ended up writing about her a second time, in what turned out to be his last production, Finishing the Picture.
I saw this play—an even more thinly veiled fictionalization of their crumbling relationship than After the Fall, occurring on the troubled set of The Misfits—not long after it premiered in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in October 2004. It was hard to resist getting a ticket for a show starring Matthew Modine, Stephen Lang, Harris Yulin, Frances Fisher, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin, and Scott Glenn.
The play moved along at a brisk pace, and, particularly with Lang and Lavin playing characters based on Actors Studio head Lee Strasberg and his wife Paula, included large doses of uncharacteristic and highly welcome humor from Miller. Moreover, it spotlights a dilemma omnipresent on nearly every film: the presence of insurance companies that can derail a production if a star becomes incapacitated or dies.
But one aspect of the play was disturbing: the character at the center of this turmoil is always seen in the most distressing of circumstances—running across the darkened stage naked in those moments when she wasn’t moaning in a drug- or alcohol-induced stupor. In fact, I can’t recall the Monroe character uttering a single intelligible syllable the whole night. It was as if Miller could not even allow his ex-wife a voice.
Terry Teachout, a prolific cultural critic whose blog has served as an inspiration for mine, dissents from the notion of Miller’s greatness that has prevailed once again after a mid-career fall from critical favor. In turn, I take issue with Teachout: Miller’s intense concentration on the family and personal failings as the source of tragedy—not one’s place in society—reinvented it for modern audiences without losing elements that had bound audiences from the Greeks to the present day.
The great irony of the playwright’s later life might have been that he never commented publicly—and only at the very end came to grips privately—with the tragedy of his post-After the Fall years: the 1966 birth of his son Daniel, stricken with Down’s syndrome.
Though it had been an open secret among his inner circle for awhile, a Vanity Fair article from this past fall led to much consternation in the blogosphere—especially over the notion that the wife Miller married after his divorce from Monroe, photographer Inge Morath, wanted to keep the baby.
Miller, however, was determined to keep it out of his life. Eventually the baby was placed in a Connecticut mental institution, where he remained for 17 years, under appalling conditions. The playwright never spoke of this fourth child and never mentioned him at all in Timebends.
Remarkable, once removed from the facility, Daniel improved and even thrived. In his last decade, Miller finally began meeting occasionally with his son, and, to his credit, changed his will shortly before his death so that his son might have a stake in the estate.
But one wonders about the psychic toll his longtime abandonment of his son took on the playwright. Miller’s creative output began to decline later in the decade, not long after the birth of his child—an ironic development in the life of a playwright whose work returns obsessively to the theme of fathers and sons.
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