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  Arthur Miller: death of a playwright February 13, 2005 Reporter : Anthony Mason  Arthur Miller was, until yesterday, America's greatest living playwright. His most famous work, Death of a Salesman, reminded his fellow Americans that the American Dream could sometimes be a nightmare. Willy Loman was a man destroyed by his belief in American capitalism and the power of success.New York Post theatre critic, Clive Barnes, said Miller was "one of the four great American playwrights of the 20th Century. He brought a new sense of realism to the American theatre, not the simple realism that has come before, which was almost cinematic, but rather a deeper sense of what it was like to be an American." Anthony Mason put together this profile of Arthur Miller in 2002, as his play, The Crucible, was being revived on Broadway. The play is about mass hysteria during the Salem witch trials, that was inspired by the witchhunt being conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy, who saw communists under every bed, and behind every play and screenplay. Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956 brought him more fame and a lot of unhappiness. In a 1992 interview with a French newspaper, he called her "highly self-destructive" and said that during their marriage: "All my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn't have much success." It was a rerun of her previous marriage to baseball legend, Joe DiMaggio. Death of a Salesman, which took Miller only six weeks to write, earned rave reviews when it opened on Broadway in February 1949, directed by Elia Kazan. The story of Willy Loman was made into a movie and staged all over the world. In 1999, 50 years after it won the Tony Award as best play, Death of a Salesman won the Tony for best revival of the Broadway season. The show also won the top acting prize for Brian Dennehy, who played Loman, and a lifetime achievement award for Miller. "Just being around to receive it is a pleasure," he joked to the audience during the awards ceremony. Miller won the New York Drama Critics' Circle's best play award twice in the 1940s, for All My Sons in 1947 and for Death of a Salesman. In 1953, he received a Tony Award for The Crucible, which is still read by thousands of American high-school students each year. It is Miller's most frequently performed work. In Joe McGinniss's book, Heroes, in which he searched for heroes across America, he talked to Arthur Miller about why there were no heroes any more. Miller explained why he still wrote each day, and that for him it was agony: "But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing." Although Arthur Miller told Anthony Mason he never thought about an epitaph, there could be no more eloquent or fitting inscription to put on his tomb: "I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing." |
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