![]() "A man whose emotional inability to understand the world around him - and we're all trying to make sense of the world around us - but what's fascinating about this is seeing a guy fall apart while trying to do the right thing.Robert A. "It's about a man's inarticulacy," says actor Mark Strong, who plays Eddie in the London revival of the play that's coming to Broadway. Eddie is convinced the Italian wants to marry his niece just to become an American citizen, so he turns him in, and alienates his own family. When his wife's Italian cousins jump ship in Brooklyn, dockworker Eddie Carbone welcomes them - until one of them starts dating his niece. His 1955 play, A View from the Bridge, deals with the persecution of illegal immigrants. He was eventually exonerated, but he said the experience affected him for the rest of his life. ![]() Miller's 1953 play, The Crucible, which centered on the Salem witch trials of 1692, was his response to what many called the witch hunts of his own day: the congressional hearings into alleged communists in the American arts community. "He's a writer who over and over again could put his finger on an understanding of what lies under social disease."Īrthur Miller smokes his pipe at the witness table prior to testifying at a hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C., on June 21, 1956. "He absolutely understands what makes a scene, what makes an act, what makes a dramatic arc, and he takes you to extraordinarily difficult and important places," Kushner says. The way he structured his plays is what sets his work apart, says fellow playwright Tony Kushner, who edited the Library of America's Collected Plays of Arthur Miller. Which you can't do in a straight realistic form," Miller said. "And the consequence was the form of Death of a Salesman, which at one and the same time carries forward his business life, his sexual life, his family life. He wrote Death of a Salesman in six weeks. Miller told me he had been trying to write a different kind of play for years. not far from where he wrote Death of a Salesman a half-century earlier. "There was that conscious desire on my part to create a form which would embrace both the social and exterior personalities of people - and the psychological life underneath," Miller told me in 1999, during a conversation at his home in Roxbury, Conn. Miller, who was born 100 years ago Saturday, found a new way to tell stories on the stage, and he set a standard for the citizen-artist. It was a poetic breakthrough in the realism-dominated theater of the day - and just one of Miller's cherished works, which also include The Crucible, All My Sons and A View from the Bridge. The play spans roughly 24 hours in the mind of Willy Loman, as he drifts from one scene to another in his life. "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away! A man is not a piece of fruit." "I put 34 years into this firm, Howard, and now I can't pay my insurance!" Loman shouts from the stage. In Arthur Miller's 1949 masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, we're never told what lead character Willy Loman sells - but he's spent a lifetime "on a shoeshine and a smile." His luck finally runs out when his boss lets him go. ![]() Playwright Arthur Miller sits at his typewriter in New York City in 1949, the same year he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Death of a Salesman.
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