Arthur Miller and the art of the possible.

Centola, Steven R.

While commenting on the difference between playwriting and screenwriting in his Preface to Everybody Wim, Arthur Miller used the following illustration to illuminate his point about the subtextual dimension of the theater:

 If a telephone is photographed, isolated on
 a table, and the camera is left running, it
 becomes more and more what it is--a tele
 phone in all its details ... Things go differently
 on a stage. Set a phone on a table
 under a light and raise the curtain, and in
 complete silence, after a few minutes, some
 thing will accrete around it. Questions
 and anticipations will begin to emanate
 from it, we will begin to imagine meanings
 in its isolation--in a word, the phone
 becomes an incipient metaphor. Possibly
 because we cannot see its detail as sharply
 as on film of because it is surrounded by
 much greater space, it begins to animate,
 to take on suggestive possibilities, very
 nearly a kind of self-consciousness.
 Something of the same is true of words as
 opposed to images. The word is not and
 can't be any more than suggestive of an
 idea or sensation; it is nothing in itself.
 ("On Screenwriting and Language" vi)

Indeed, in itself a word is nothing. If we believe the structuralists, a word is a symbol, a signifer or sign, a marker of meaning that points to something, some referent or vast reservoir of negotiable meanings beyond itself. The diacritical nature of language inevitably means that even small differences in sound and sense will produce tremendous variance in the determination and reception of meaning. Even more significantly, and perhaps more problematically, if we take a post-structuralist approach to language, a word points to an endless chain of linked signifiers, and given the arbitrary nature of the signifier and the system of which it is a part, this endless linked series of associations inevitably multiplies the potential meanings of every word and every sequence of words forming sentences in written texts. The nuance that every word takes on and generates in the reader's mind is affected by the nuances all these words have in combination with each other, and all of this is then complicated by unanticipated associations which generate a host of linked associations and impressions, which collectively form unexpected meanings as they stimulate the reader's imagination and even tap into the unconscious. Perhaps for this reason, then, Miller, almost sounding a little like a deconstructive theorist, characterizes the word as nothing, but for Miller in its very, nothingness lie the richness, density, and infinite possibilities of the word. After all, Miller tells us, "a description in words tends to inflate, expand, and inflame the imagination, so that in the end the thing or person described is amplified into a larger-than-life figment" ("On Screenwriting and Language" v). And that is the crucial part of the equation (or the playwright: how to generate, shape, and string together words; how to invent and hone theater language in such a way that what is created constructs metaphorically an impression of reality that is powerful and suggestive enough to stimulate an imaginative response within the audience. As Miller recognizes, the possibilities inherent within the whole dramatic event are limitless, for the fundamental indeterminacy of meaning--an indeterminacy that Roland Barthes says inevitably results from the plural nature of the play text as a discourse that can be experienced only in the art of production- poses no nihilistic threat in Miller's world. Such indeterminacy instead opens up the possibility for rich speculative and imaginative discovery and generates endless opportunities for creative and diverse interpretations--possibly, even, a reinscription of oppositions, both with his own work and in the life and condition of humanity he depicts in his art. Miller's comments on the limitless and constantly mutating accretions accumulating around the words spoken and objects presented on the stage not only call attention to the subtextual dimension of the theater, but also show why this very important feature of dramatic art makes the theater what Miller described in 1999 as "the art of the possible" (Echoes 312).

Although in his commentary on the difference between the cinema and the theater Miller does not give enough credit to good film directors who can skillfully use the camera's eye to capture, isolate, and present certain aspects of individual objects or scenes on the screen in such a way that endows these scenic images with tremendous symbolic significance, he does make an important point about the special nature of theatrical presentation that causes words and objects on the stage to gather accretions around them and take on a subtextual dimension that knows no bounds. Whether it is the word or the scenic image, lighting or sound, gesture or action, the language of the theater resonates with extraordinary suggestiveness at almost any moment in a good play. And that suggestiveness resonates with a stream of endless associations and impressions that change not only from performance to performance but also for every new audience. Christopher Bigsby effectively describes the magical transformation that occurs during a theatrical performance:

 Theatre is a form of alchemy and if the end-product
 is not always gold at least certain transformations
 have been effected. Frederick March, Lee J. Cobb,
 Dustin Hoffman, and Warren Mitchell have all
 played the part of Willy Loman in Death of a
 Salesman. They spoke the same lines to the same
 characters but they spoke them differently to different
 audiences, in different sets, in front of different
 people, in different theatres, at different times on
 different continents ... Whenever any of us open our
 mouths we speak the past. The words we use have
 passed through other mouths. They've been shaped,
 over time, by pleasures not our own. They're like
 our own, but they're not our own. They've shed and
 accumulated meanings. Perhaps that's the reason
 we're drawn to the theatre. It enacts our own central
 dilemma as actors inhabit someone else's words
 and struggle to make them their own, just as we try
 to imprint ourselves on the given. ("British View"
 19-20)

As Bigsby points out, the theater is a place of transformation. The theater is a place where nature is transmuted into art, where reality meets and fuses with illusion, where text and subtext, character and action, word and gesture become one, where opposites are held in balanced suspension, and that, of course, is why the theater is the realm of the possible.

The theater, unlike everything else--the cinema, the novel, and the poem--is a living spectacle. That is why Clive Bloom says that the

 visceral, three-dimensionality of the theatrical space,
 at once muscular presence and fragile voice, is the
 sinful nature of raw knowledge. Unlike film and
 television, even and especially unlike commercial
 radio, the theatre offers an authenticity which is
 shocking and peculiarly distressing ... a type of primary
 authenticity which unravels or questions the
 inauthenticity of popular consumer culture and the
 values of the American system." (Introduction to
 American Drama 2-3)

"The sinful nature of raw knowledge," the peculiar "authenticity" of the theatrical event, as Bloom puts it, derives mainly from the fact that it is a live performance and therefore its success depends on the performance, and oftentimes the interpretation, of the performer who responds to cues within the script and directorial decisions, and helps to turn word into speech and action, which transmutes art into life and makes a text a living presence on the stage for a live audience. The theater is not limited to of constrained by the script. That is certainly the play's beginning, but that is most definitely not its end. Undeniably, because it is a collaborative art form, the play, even more so than the novel, the cinema, or the poem, transcends the author's intentions and understanding and essentially takes on a life of its own in each performance. The world of the play can never be entirely circumscribed by the playwright's intentions any more than an author writing in any other genre of literature can completely know of predict the implication, association, or interpretation of every single word for each individual reading, and reacting to, a particular work. To borrow a phrase from John Barth, who used it in a different context, focusing more on the art of narrative composition than on the act of reading or responding to literary works, we can accurately characterize the genre of drama as "a literature of replenishment" (The Friday Book 206). Text and subtext, word and gesture, speech and action--all of these are fused into a remarkably coherent orchestration of sound and silence, light and darkness, time and space, past and present, reality and illusion. Opposites maintain a steady equilibrium in a carefully balanced and beautifully suspended presentation that momentarily, almost magically, transports us not only to an imagined world inhabited by invented people, but that also mysteriously invades our deepest consciousness and somehow suspends our individual ego while facilitating a group consciousness that affects us not only in the theater but also long after we experience the magic of the theatrical event. "What the performance of a play gives an audience," says Robert A. Martin, "is less a set of ideas, propositions, or abstractions about life and how to live it than what Arthur Miller has called a 'felt experience,' the imaginative sharing and participation in the lives and action of imaginary characters" ("The Nature of Tragedy" 97). "The performance is mythic; our sensibilities are enlivened by imaginary characters and we become engaged in their conflicts ... {and by vicariously living through the characters' conflicts in the theater} we also see how their lives illuminate, by association, our own lives as individuals and as members of a larger society" (98). For all of these reasons, Arthur Miller is right in calling theater "the art of the possible" (Echoes 312).

What about Miller's own theater--a theater that has addressed the problems of war-profiteering crimes, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the Great Depression, the inherent flaws in the American Dream of material success, mental illness, memory loss, infidelity, bigamy, incestuous desire, corruption in the American criminal justice system, censorship and the invasion of privacy in totalitarian countries, and other problems threatening to diminish the value of human life in the modern age? His theater emphasizes the tragic conditions of human existence, a theater that oftentimes depicts frustration, anguish, and failure as the prevailing condition of people trapped by circumstances and the crush of overwhelming forces in their society or within their own psyche. Can we justifiably call Miller's theater the art of the possible too? I believe that we can, and my purpose in this essay is to attempt to explain why I believe that his humanist values and postmodernist perspective provide audiences worldwide with a vision of humanity that is uplifting and life-affirming. His plays offer hope and solace for a world desperately seeking to find a glimmer of hope in a world of darkness. In spite of his tragic vision and brutally honest confrontation with the dark forces of human depravity, Miller's plays show the possibility for redemption, transcendence, even triumph in the face of seemingly overpowering odds and adversity most inimical to human enterprise and achievement.

Miller's theater is not escapist in nature, but neither is it fatalistic, pessimistic, of nihilistic. It is a drama of hope not despair, transcendence not reduction, and, above all else, the limitless potentialities and possibilities of the human spirit.

When I interviewed Arthur Miller in August 2001, he spoke of one of his more recent creations: Mr. Peters' Connections, which was produced at the Signature Theater in 1998. The play is set in a dilapidated nightclub, which Mr. Peters has entered to meet his wife. On one level, it seems as if they may be interested in purchasing and renovating the establishment for future use, but during the course of his conversations with other characters, it becomes clear that Mr. Peters seems uncertain of why he's even in this particular setting. On another level, though, it is easy to view the set as completely symbolic, representing the interior consciousness of Mr. Harry Peters, an elderly man on the verge of death, trapped somewhere between life and death, between consciousness and unconscious reverie. As the play progresses and Mr. Peters engages in spirited, but sometimes puzzling and even depressing, conversations with both real and imagined characters, some alive and in the present and some dead and resurrected from memories and images of the past, it becomes evident to the audience that Mr. Peters is primarily concerned with finding some thread to his life experience that ties everything together into a neat package, an orderly and meaningful whole that has purpose, design, definition, and clarity. His obsessive interest in finding the unseen inherent order is blatantly shown through his repetitive questioning of both himself and the others about the "subject" he searches for in their conversation. Early in the play, Mr. Peters, on the verge of understanding his dilemma but never completely coming to full conscious awareness of his insight, says: "I just cannot find the subject! Like I'll be strolling down the street, and suddenly I'm weeping, everything welling up.--What is the subject? Know what I mean? Simply cannot grasp the subject" (8). Clarifying the significance of this repeated insistence by Mr. Peters on finding and understanding "the subject," Miller, in his Preface to the play, tells us that Mr. Peters is searching for "the secret, the pulsing center of energy, what he calls the subject--that will make his life cohere" (viii). By the play's end, Mr. Peters is no more certain of what the subject is than he was at its beginning, and this lack of resolution--this failure to reach a definitive position about the subject--was not received well by Miller's critics, and is perhaps even primarily responsible for the play being greeted with what Robert Brustein has characterized as "the worst reviews of Miller's career" ("Still Searching for Theater" 29-30).

Undoubtedly, one of the negative reviews Brustein refers to is his own. Writing for the Neu' Republic in 1998, Brustein describes Mr. Peters' Connections as "windy, tiresome, self-conscious, and full of moony maundering." Associating what he views as the play's structural flaws with the playwright's inability to articulate his vision coherently, Brustein assumes that Miller unintentionally creates a formless play that lacks resolution. Brustein writes:

 Miller is so eager to get things off his chest that he
 hasn't bothered to provide his new play with a plot,
 a form, or even much effort at characterization ... Mr.
 Peters' Connections is like a long confession to a friend
 which has yet to be proofed of edited.... He {Mr.
 Peters} is looking for some continuity with his history
 in "the hope of finding a subject." It is like
 watching Arthur Miller at his typewriter wrestling
 with the same elusive goal. ("Still Searching for
 Theater" 29-30)

Brustein is not alone in identifying Harry Peters' struggle for certitude with Miller's own personal frustrations, both as a writer seeking to find the perfect form for his vision and as an alienated artist who has sadly witnessed the terrible transformation of the world surrounding him. Writing for the Village Voice, Michael Feingold argues that Harry Peters is nothing more than a mouthpiece for Arthur Miller. Feingold writes: "Like his hero, the 82-year-old Miller barely seems to be connecting to the outside world these days. His connections are to his memories, to his puzzlement over the countless ways life has changed in this half-century, and to whatever method he uses now to get words on paper" ("The Old Miller Stream" 147). Making the same assumption, Nina Raine and Frances Stonor Saunders, reviewing the play for the Neu' Statesman during its production in London during the fall 2000 season, also identify the playwright with his character: "thoughts of a dry brain in an off-Broadway season. As Mr. Peters (or, rather, Miller) repeatedly exclaims: 'There is no subject any more'" ("Miller's Tale" 30). This brief sampling of the critical response to the New York and London productions of Mr. Peters' Connections reveals two trends in the reviewers' response to the play: one, the tendency to identify the author with his character and, two, the conclusion that Miller, and his play, present the audience with a grim, maybe even pessimistic, view of the human condition, a view in their minds undoubtedly invited by the play's unsettling approach to its central thematic interest, which echoes jarringly in the phrase "There is no subject any more." While many have taken Mr. Peters' Connections to be a radical departure from Miller's other works and have read the play as a depressing conclusion to a long and distinguished career, the play's thematic center can actually be seen as perfectly consonant with the playwright's vision throughout his career and, in fact, offers its audiences a vision of hope and human possibility, not despair.

In our discussion in August 2001 Miller confirmed that there is a subject in Mr. Peters' Connections; the playwright identifies it for us in his play. Humanity, as Miller put it in our conversation, the human mind, is the subject. Miller does not find it disturbing or depressing that there is no inherent order or purpose to life and human existence. The greatness of humanity lies in its ability to forge meaning out of chaos. The human mind, Miller believes, shapes, defines, clarifies, orders, and gives purpose and meaning to life and human existence. In its unmediated state, life is chaos. Entropy is more than just a theory; it is the fundamental condition of the expanding universe, within which we struggle to resist the forces of chaos and destruction and to elevate and ennoble the human condition. The human mind alone brings light into a world of darkness, and because of its power of transcendence and capacity for reason and logical discourse, the human mind is worthy of celebration. "What is the subject?" asks Mr. Peters. Miller answers: we are--and his play implicitly provides this answer by showing us Mr. Peters' thoughtful attempt to wrest some meaning out of his life's experiences. In essence, his quest parallels that of Oedipus and other great tragic figures who seek to understand the conditions of life and their own unique role in shaping their personal destiny. Mr. Peters is no tragic figure, but his efforts are noble and commendable and comment positively on the potential of humanity for honest self-exploration. Mr. Peters' Connections, like so much of Miller's work, is ultimately a tribute to the art of the possible.

Earlier in his career, Miller wrote plays that more forcefully explored this subject in the tragic mode and seemed, even more so than Mr. Peters' Connections, to have little to do with human possibility. In All Bly Sons and Death of a Salesman, for example, we are presented with characters who clearly seem to be and even controlled by environmental forces that severely diminish their capacity for free choice. However, nothing is that simple in Miller's world. There always remains a strong interplay between freedom and fate, a paradoxical balance between deterministic forces at play in the lives of individuals and the exercise and expression of one's own free will that invariably triggers some catastrophic event.

All My Sons tells the story of a successful Mid-Western manufacturer of airplane parts who knowingly allows defective engines to be shipped to the United States Army during the Second World War. As a result of his war profiteering crimes, twenty-one American pilots die when the cracked cylinder heads cause their planes to malfunction and crash. Exonerated by the courts for his role in the catastrophe, Joe Keller, the play's central character, triumphantly returns to his community and futilely attempts to return to a life of normalcy, pretending the crime never occurred. The semblance of family harmony is maintained until his son, Chris, himself under pressure as his fiancee's brother forces him to acknowledge his own acquiescence, questions Joe about his role in the sordid business transaction. Chris, who fought bravely in combat during the war and had seen many of his troops perish under his command, has a different outlook from his father on the question of an individual's social responsibility. After several powerful scenes of intense debate over the individual's relation to society, Chris finally discloses his father's guilt and challenges him to accept responsibility for his actions. Until his son forces him to acknowledge his wrongdoing, Joe Keller steadfastly maintains his innocence and justifies his anti-social behavior by proclaiming his right to do anything necessary to keep the business from collapsing and ensure his family's survival. Ultimately, as a suicide letter discloses that his older brother preferred death over the ignominy that issued from his father's war crime, Chris convinces his father that he has an obligation to others in society as well. Tortured by his guilt and unable to deal with the shame in his son's eyes, Keller tries to escape from his intolerable situation by putting a bullet in his head. The play ends with Chris facing with horror his own complicity in his father's death With Joe Keller's suicide, the play forcefully repudiates anti-social behavior that derives from the myth of privatism in American society.

So why should we see this play as exemplifying what Miller calls "the art of the possible"? Where is the hope and possibility in a man's suicide following his realization of the enormity of his anti-social behavior? In an interview with Henry Brandon in 1960, Miller made a statement that seems to point toward an understanding of the process of indirection that enables his drama to leave us with hope, while presenting his audiences with portraits and chronicles of despair. Miller said: "a playwright provides answers by the questions he chooses to ask, by the exact conflicts in which he places his people" (quoted in Theater Essays 227). In All My Sons, as in the rest of his drama, Miller conveys a sense of possibility for humanity by showing his audience the opportunity for choice; for the selection of a different course of action in his characters' lives. Like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge, and Maggie in After the Fall, Joe Keller chooses to see himself as a victim of others, and of circumstances imposed on businessmen like himself during the Second World War. He adopts a counterfeit innocence and embraces the illusion that he is a victim of society, of the competitive business world, of the culture that makes it imperative for a man in American society to feel driven by the need to prosper, provide for the family, and succeed in attaining the forever elusive, unquestionably mythic American Dream. Keller denies his personal culpability so that he can preserve his false image of himself and maintain the illusion that he has regained his rightful place in society. He blinds himself from the impulses that make him a danger to himself and others in his society. Keller cannot face what Miller calls "the murder in him, the sly and everlasting complicity with the forces of destruction" (quoted in Theater Essays 256). Keller chooses his behavior; it isn't chosen for him or forced on him. His betrayal of trust and refusal to accept responsibility for others sets in motion the chain of events that lead to his self-destruction. Through showing us what happens when a man nullifies the value of the social contract through the performance and justification of indefensible anti-social acts, Miller emphasizes the importance of socially responsible behavior and makes clear why crimes against society must be censured. The sense of possibility in All My Sons derives from one simple fact: Joe Keller chose his late and could have chosen differently. Among other things, All My Sons shows that the impulse to betray others and deny responsibility for the welfare of society, when left ungoverned, can run rampant and wreak havoc on the individual, his family, and his society--even, perhaps, civilization as a whole. The Kellers, and many of those around them, choose to blame everyone else for their dilemma, but the play actually shows its audiences that they are the authors of their destiny and failure to accept the tremendous burden of their freedom and responsibility is itself the cause of their personal tragedy.

In an essay published in 1964, Richard Loughlin offers an interesting perspective on the way All My Sons leaves its audiences with a sense of hope for the future. Discussing the play as a tragedy in Aristotelian terms, Loughlin argues that

 The spectacle of the crimes and sufferings of another
 stimulates our sympathy; it reminds us of the perils
 and uncertainties of the human condition and of the
 golden thread of strength of character that ties us all
 together. Such meditation on life's challenges and
 values may prompt us to rededicate our lives to
 those ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful
 that any work of art enshrines. What ideals are
 apparent or implied in All My Sons? Honesty,
 brotherhood, patriotism, and true love, to mention
 the most obvious ones. ("Tradition and Tragedy in
 'All My Sons'" 27)

More recently, Hersh Zeifman discussed the play's extraordinary fusion of form and vision as deriving from the playwright's "rage for order, for an anodyne to {our} 'helplessness before the chaos of existence'" ("All My Sons. After the Fall: Arthur Miller and the Rage for Order" 107). In its "relentless Ibsenite ... linearity, chronology, causality ... the quest for order is dramatized in the play ... not only formally but thematically: the conflict between Chris Keller and his father is precisely the struggle between order and chaos"(108). In their life-and-death struggle of ethics and values," the Kellers present audiences with an important lesson about "relatedness" and the necessity for "a connection with the larger family of humanity" (108). The conflict they experience speaks directly to every member of the audience, for as Robert A. Martin points out,

 Miller's great achievement as a playwright allows us
 to see and understand particular characters or groups
 of characters as possessing universal, human traits,
 even as we also see how their lives illuminate, by
 association, our own lives as individuals and as
 members of our larger society. In recognizing these
 larger concerns, we recognize as well that Miller's
 plays are not exclusively about individuals, but more
 precisely, are about humanity and human societies
 with all their contradictions and complications.
 ("The Nature of Tragedy" 98)

Nowhere is this aspect of Miller's drama more evident than in his masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, for in its searing portrait of a family in conflict, Miller achieves a near-perfect synthesis of the social, moral, psychological, personal, and metaphysical levels of experience, and shows how the death of a single individual touches everyone in his family and audiences that witness his tragic collapse.

Much like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman presents us with an individual, and a family, that have lost their ability to separate fact from fiction, truth from lies, reality from illusion. The Lomans are so deeply entrenched in the life-lie they have embraced that they find it nearly impossible to communicate with each other without resorting to the cliched rhetoric they have imbibed from the prevailing success myths in their capitalistic society. Death of a Salesman is possibly Arthur Miller's greatest play. It has been called the quintessentially American play, and perhaps it has generated more critical and scholarly discussion over the efficacy of the popular concept of the American Dream than any other work of literature dealing with American society. Studies of this play invariably discuss Willy Loman's self-delusion and moral confusion in relation to Miller's indictment of the competitive, capitalistic society that is responsible for dehumanizing the individual and transforming the once promising agrarian American dream into an urban nightmare. But whether it is approached as a tragedy of the common man, a social drama indicting capitalism and American business ethics, a sociological consideration of work alienation and its impact on identity, a cultural critique of the American family and stereotypical gender roles in American society, a modern morality play about today's Everyman, of a complex psychological study of guilt, repression, and psychosis, Death of a Salesman is a compelling drama that makes for an intensely moving and hauntingly memorable theatrical experience. Despite its overwhelming sense of tragic inevitability, the play gains most of its power from Miller's ability to turn the self-destructive journey of Willy Loman into a tribute to the worth and nobility of the human spirit. Even in the very process of showing the devastating consequences that result when the individual succumbs to the lure of denial and self-delusion, Death of a Salesman somehow manages to affirm the value of human life and the potential for every individual to strive to achieve the impossible dream of human perfectibility.

Miller's masterpiece tells the story of the irrepressible sixty-three year-old traveling salesman, Willy Loman, who strives to retrieve his lost dignity and his family's love on the last day of his life. This icon of the American theater represents every person, both in American society and throughout the world, who has ever felt displaced from his rightful position in his society and longed to attain a sense of peace and belonging in a world that suddenly seems foreign and even hostile to his pretensions. Using a highly suggestive multiple set to emphasize the subjective nature of the play, Miller collapses past and present and takes us inside the mind of Willy Loman to show us how an individual nurtured on success-formula platitudes and get-rich-quick schemes buys fully into the notion of the American Dream without ever really evaluating of understanding how false and incomplete are the values he embraces in his venal American society. Desperate to make sense of his life and to avoid seeing himself as a failure, both as salesman and father, Willy Loman tries to escape the burden of responsibility for the choices he has made and, instead, seeks facile solutions to complex personal and economic problems. Willy's painful struggle "to evaluate himself justly" ("Tragedy," Theater Essays 4) is what grips audiences around the world, for everyone, not just people who are culturally or ideologically predisposed to embrace the American Dream, can understand the anguish that derives from "being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world" (Tragedy," Theater Essays 5).

During this last day in his life, Willy drifts back and forth between the past and the present, groping for answers to his problematic relationship with his son Biff, and futilely trying to ease his conscience about past indiscretions and missed opportunities that he fears have cost him the love, respect, and honor that society has trained him to expect as customary entitlements for male heads of household in the American family. As he sets up and then destroys opportunities for disclosures that would reveal his role in creating the destiny he seeks to avoid, Willy repeatedly attempts to deny his role in any wrongdoing in the past that would demand his acknowledgment and acceptance of responsibility for his own, and his sons', failures. He tries to preserve an inflated image of himself as both salesman and father and convince others that the identity he has manufactured is real. As a result of submerging himself so thoroughly in his life-lie, Willy experiences a complete disengagement from reality and virtually drives himself mad. His psychological disorientation is strongly evoked in the play's setting, lighting, music, and dramatic structure, particularly in director Robert Falls' postmodernist set design for the play in 1999, which vividly conveys and externalizes the fragmentation rending Willy apart and driving him inevitably to his tragic suicide.

Again, one has to wonder how a play that depicts the unmitigated frustration and failure of delusional and desperate characters can succeed in conveying any sense of hope and possibility for its audiences. According to Zygmunt Adamczewski, Willy's tragic suicide "gives poignancy to existence in protest" as an individual who senses "the loss of his self," the fact that "he is not what he is" (Tragic Protest 190, 191). In other words, Willy's tragic protest comments on the paradoxical condition that defines human existence: the constant struggle within the individual between self and society, right and wrong, love and hate, joy and sorrow, consciousness and unconsciousness, work and play, success and failure, past and present, life and death. Life is flux, and human life is frequently characterized by internal conflict. It the value of a human life may ultimately be determined by the extent to which an individual struggles against contradictory and entropic impulses in an effort to give existence purpose and meaning, then it is easy to see why Death ala Salesman is so popular and successful and moves audiences around the world with its searing presentation of the Loman tragedy. Willy Loman's battle is everyone's battle, for despite his particular failings and annoying eccentricities, Willy's futile attempt to resist reduction and atomization, and his constant flight from his alienated condition, reflect a universal need for personal triumph over the forces that deny individuality and threaten to diminish our humanity. Life is change: conflict, tension, a war of wills and desires, an everlasting struggle to bring order to chaos and impose meaning on a fundamentally absurd world. It is the entropic condition that Willy Loman resists, and because of Willy's fierce determination to fight an impossible battle against the inherent conditions of human existence, Miller tells us that "There is a nobility ... in Willy's struggle" (Beijing 27). Willy, explains Miller, "is trying to lift up a belief in immense redeeming human possibilities" (Beijing 29). That is the attraction and glory of Willy Loman: his limitless hope in the face of hopelessness and refusal to accept defeat even when thoroughly defeated. Willy's persistent struggle to resist the force of entropy in his life is ultimately what defines the tragic spirit of Miller's vision in Death of a Salesman.

Miller's play gives us an unblinking look at the terrifying darkness that lies coiled within existence. Attendant to this dark vision is the discovery that the light enkindled by human kindness and love can give human life a brilliance and luster that will never be extinguished. Willy dies, but death does not defeat Willy Loman; as the Requiem demonstrates, Willy will continue to live on in the memories and lives of others. Through his remarkable fusion of opposites that express both the form and the vision of the play, Miller reveals the condition of tension that is life and human existence. Because of its perfect integration of form, character, and action, Death of a Salesman is a modern masterpiece that celebrates, as Chris Bigsby eloquently states, "the miracle of human life, in all its bewilderments, its betrayals, its denials, but, finally, and most significantly, its transcendent worth" ("Poet" 723).

"The Crucible," writes Miller, "is, internally, Salesman's blood brother. It is examining the questions I was absorbed with before--the conflict between a man's raw deeds and his conception of himself; the question of whether conscience is in fact an organic part of the human being, and what happens when it is handed over not merely to the state of the mores of the time but to one's friend of wife" ("Brewed in The Crucible," Theater Essays 172-173). The powerful manner in which The Crucible explores these questions explains why it is also regarded as a masterpiece of the modern stage. The Crucible is Arthur Miller's most frequently produced play and speaks to people all over the world of the need to resist tyranny and oppression. Miller's play transcends cultural and geographical boundaries with its inspired depiction of one man's heroic struggle to preserve his honor when threatened by a corrupt state authority. With its intense dramatic action and its absorbing look at the debilitating effects of guilt, fear, repression, personal betrayal, mass hysteria, and public confession, The Crucible shows how an individual can rise above the conditions surrounding him and transform guilt into responsibility and thereby defeat the deterministic forces, both within and outside him, that threaten to destroy his identity as well as his humanity.

The Crucible dramatizes one of the darkest episodes in American history: the Salero Witch Trials of 1692. Making just a few alterations to the historical record in the interest of intensifying the play's dramatic action and clarifying and revealing the characters' hidden motivation, Miller shows what happens when girls in the repressive Puritan community of Salem Village in 1692 make unfounded accusations of witchcraft against their neighbors. Hundreds are arrested and convicted of witchcraft and nineteen innocent people are hanged. Among those incarcerated is John Proctor, a citizen of the community, a successful farmer and landowner who has committed adultery with Abigail Williams, one of the principal accusers and witnesses for the state. Proctor's guilt over his infidelity and conviction that he is a sinner, and therefore not like the falsely accused, temporarily causes him to sign a phony confession of witchcraft in an effort to save his life and protect his family. But when he realizes that his confession must be made public and therefore will be used to damage the credibility of his friends and neighbors and justify their persecution, Proctor fiercely denounces the court and tears up his confession. In a powerful dramatic scene, Proctor insists that his name not be used to damage the reputation of others, and even though his inspiring act of courage and nobility leads directly to his execution, it simultaneously becomes the basis for his own personal redemption.

Ironically, because of Proctor's defiant act of heroism and decision to die a noble death rather than live ignobly, it is easier to see how The Crucible demonstrates the possibility for human transcendence than is at first evident in both All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Yet the conditions for such individualistic behavior are certainly far less favorable in the Puritan community of 1692 that Miller dramatizes in The Crucible than in the American society of the 1940s he depicts in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Because Salem Village was a theocracy, every facet of an individual's life in that community could arguably be seen as demonstrating the inevitable intersection of the societal and personal dimensions of a person's experience. In essence, everything a person said or did in Salem Village in 1692 could have been construed as having a direct bearing on society and, therefore, would unquestionably receive the close scrutiny of the larger community. Yet, in spite of the strong limitations and constraints placed on an individual's personal liberties and freedoms in that society, John Proctor is able to rise above the deterministic conditions surrounding him and find the courage and strength needed to denounce the court's inane proceedings. Through the crucible of his personal suffering, Proctor embraces values that are life-affirming, and with his acceptance of his personal responsibility for the welfare of others, Proctor defeats death and wins a victory for humankind.

Perhaps the situation that was most inimical to the potentialities of the human spirit in the twentieth century was the Holocaust. Yet, even in this most disturbing spectacle of human depravity and unspeakable atrocity, Miller finds hope for the triumph of the human spirit. As Edward Isser rightly asserts, "Arthur Miller is perhaps the foremost spokesman for a universalist and humanistic interpretation of the Holocaust" ("Arthur Miller and the Holocaust" 155). This horrible testament to human depravity and the capacity (or evil and despicable acts of human aggression looms large in three plays, a novel, a screenplay, and even an autobiography by Miller.

Miller first tackles this subject in his novel Focus (1945), which establishes strong parallels between the Nazi movement in Europe and the Anti Semitism promoted in America by the Christian Front and other hate groups who persecuted Jews during the Second World War. Only after experiencing the unjust persecution that results from being mistakenly identified as a Jew does the novel's central character find the courage to stand up to the fascists persecuting Jews in his neighborhood, and counter their barbaric behavior with socially responsible action. In After the Fall, Miller creates even greater discomfort for his audiences by asking them to find within themselves the locus of evil that gives rise to such movements as nazism and the terrible hate crimes associated with the Holocaust. To concretize this direct association between private and public acts of aggression, the silhouette of a concentration camp tower is illuminated periodically in After the Fall, as the play's central character, Quentin, struggles to understand why his own personal acts of betrayal and cruelty are linked in his mind with the horrors that occurred at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Quentin ultimately accepts his culpability in the horrors he detests because he realizes that no one is innocent after the fall. In Incident at Vichy, detainees awaiting interrogation by their Nazi captors are fearful that, it discovered to be Jews, they will be sent in locked boxcars to concentration camps in Poland for extermination. Each prisoner adopts what ultimately amounts to an ineffective strategy for explaining his captivity and dealing with the absurd impending interrogation. One by one, they are treated inhumanely by their captors, checked for circumcision, and then sent to certain death in the camps. Only one prisoner, the psychiatrist Leduc, is able to elude this horrible destiny as a result of the heroic and noble sacrifice of an Austrian Prince, who hands over his pass to freedom and courageously proves that it is possible to resist tyranny and oppression by transforming guilt into responsibility.

The advent of the Holocaust is the subject of Broken Glass. The play's central character, Sylvia Gellburg, suffers severe hysterical paralysis as she learns that old Jews and young children are being abused and ridiculed in Germany during Kristallnacht. Her anxiety over their condition and unconscious association of the Nazis' cruelty with her husband's abusive treatment of her and condescension toward Jews triggers the emotional disorder that leaves her physically incapacitated until her husband's unexpect ed death. Perhaps, though, Miller's most disturbing and direct treatment of the Holocaust occurs in his television screenplay adaptation of Fania Fenelon's memoirs: Playing for Time. This brutally frank depiction of the anguish and heroism of a woman captive in a concentration camp during the Second World War celebrates the courage and nobility of spirit exhibited by an individual who refuses to relinquish her dignity and act in a way that degrades the human species. In spite of the unspeakable horrors and ordeals she faces and the severe constraints imposed on her by her captors, her environment, and her impossible situation, Fania Fenelon, says Miller, shows that "it was possible to exercise free will even in a concentration camp" (quoted in Atlas 32).

Among other things, says Miller, his Holocaust drama teaches us an important lesson about ourselves:

 that we should see the bestiality in our own hearts,
 so that we should know how we are brothers not
 only to these victims but to the Nazis, so that the
 ultimate tenor of our lives should be faced--namely
 our own sadism, our own fear of standing firm on
 humane principles against the obscene power of
 mass organization. ("The Shadow of the Gods,"
 Theater Essays 187)

The lessons do not end there. In his Holocaust drama, as in all of his other plays, the twin pillars on which his characters' personal morality rests are freedom and responsibility. As a character struggles not only to survive but also to do so with honor and integrity, Fania Fenelon demonstrates that it is imperative that the individual accept the possibility for free, and responsible, choices and behavior. In Playing for Time, Fania Fenelon counters the evil darkness of the Nazis with her commitment to a morality that fosters and promotes compassion, understanding, tolerance, honesty, and self-discipline. She selects and upholds values that ennoble the human species and affirm the value and importance of every individual life. In the most abhorrent conditions that are most inimical to the exercise of free will, a concentration camp prisoner finds it possible to prove that human beings are capable of the most courageous moral action even when faced with the threat of imminent death.

By writing so powerfully about the Holocaust, Miller may be suggesting that though art cannot guarantee the survival of humanity, it can help to justify and validate the worth of human existence. Miller clearly creates art for life's sake. He once said that the Great Depression made him "impatient with anything, including art, which pretends that it can exist for its own sake and still be of prophetic importance" ("The Shadows of the Gods," Theater Essays 179). For Miller, literature, and particularly the theater, must "speak to the present condition of man's life and thus would implicitly have to stand against injustice as the destroyer of life" (Timebends 596). Nowhere is this commitment made more evident than in his harrowing screenplay of humanity's darkest hour and greatest triumph. In the midst of a hellish landscape of human suffering and depravity, one woman faced the ultimate challenge to her dignity and proved that nothing, not even the threat of a horrible death, could force the individual to ace ignobly or relinquish her sense of personal responsibility. Fania Fenelon's triumph is ultimately a triumph of the human spirit--one that Miller presents dramatically to confirm the possibility of giving meaning and dignity to human existence.

Regardless of the conditions and limitations on the individual in Miller's plays, his characters have the ability to choose the course of action that determines their values and behavior. The moral truth that speaks so loudly in Miller's plays derives from a single premise: we are free to create our destinies. His characters have the ability to face and accept what is real and thereby to discover the truth about their lives and identities. Although characters like Joe Keller, Willy Loman, Eddie Carbone, and Lyman Felt do not exercise their freedom to choose honestly and responsibly, that fact does not mitigate the possibility for such expression of their free will to occur.

Bigsby has long maintained that for Arthur Miller the theater has always been "a realm of possibility" (American Drama 248). By creating plays that show the human will as inexhaustible and irrepressible, Miller expresses a vision of humanity that shows that transcendence is coexistent with consciousness, and this special attribute of human existence both curses and blesses humanity because it invariably sets us off on a life-long journey to attain the impossible dream--a more-than-American dream for perfection. Struggle endows our lives with meaning; the theater of Arthur Miller offers the following message to his audience: as long as we continue to wrestle with our givens, resist the forces of chaos and entropy, and struggle to impose order on the natural world and our mental landscape, we will have an opportunity, a possibility, for a meaningful life. No easy task, admits the playwright, but entirely within the realm of the possible.

WORKS CITED

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Martin, Robert A. "The Nature of Tragedy." South Atlantic Review 61 (1996): 97-106.

Miller, Arthur "Brewed in The Crucible." The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Edited by Robert A Martin and Steven R. Centola. New York: DaCapo P, 1996. 172-74.

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--. "On Screenwriting and Language." Everybody Wins. New York: Grove Press, 1990. v-xiv.

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--. Timebends, A Life New York: Grove P, 1987.

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Zeifman, Hersh "All My Sons After the Fall: Arthur Miller and the Rage for Order" The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Brechtian Stage. Ed. Enoch Brater Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995 107-20