Tom's Two Cents: Arthur Miller, by Martin Gottfried, and American Drama of the 20th Century

Some months back, when I started to read Tennessee Williams' new biography by John Lahr, I got sidetracked into Arthur and Barbara Gelb's bio of Eugene O'Neill, and ultimately the Miller biography cited above; so that by the time I finished, I had read approximately two thousand pages that pretty much comprised the history of American drama from roughly 1920 to 1960.  When I say "American Drama," I mean just that, not American musical theatre, not even American theatre in the lighter, Broadway sense.  I'm referring to drama in the literary sense, a genre comparable to the novel and poetry.

Drama has a long tradition, going back to Classical times (the Greeks had drama festivals along with their Olympics) and culminating in the plays of Shakespeare during the Elizabethan Age.  Up until the early 20s America had mostly vaudeville, musical reviews and melodrama, although there were a few exceptions, e.g, Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" (1859), the first play to present the problem of slavery seriously.  Eugene O'Neill became our first and greatest dramatist up to the 40s, followed by the Yin and Yang of American Drama, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.

No two men could have been more different.  Williams was a born and bred Southerner, with all that implies.  Miller was an East Coast Jewish intellectual, with all that implies. Williams wrote about people and places, especially about unstable, neurotic Southern women.  Miller wrote plays of ideas, often in historical and social context.   Williams was a tormented homosexual; born too early to find a social niche in American society, he floundered personally and professionally after his early successes.  Except for a mild flirtation with Communism in the 50s, Miller was eminently respectable, yet he too could not escape personal trauma--his first marriage took a nose-dive after he became entangled,  through Director Elia Kazan, with none other than the Hollywood sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe.

Before that, Miller had written what some consider to be the finest play yet produced in America, "Death of a Salesman," a play that still resonates today with the American obsession with material success.  His relationship with Marilyn Monroe evolved into a tragically unsuccessful marriage that virtually destroyed his career.  He tried to encapsulate that experience later in an all too personal play, "After the Fall," that did his reputation little good.  (Ironically, Williams, not Miller could have handled this material more successfully and certainly could have provided a more sympathetic portrayal of its heroine!). After an inevitable divorce, Miller made somewhat of a comeback, mostly in Europe, and again married, this time to a not famous Scandinavian photographer, Inge Morath, who shared with him a final and successful marriage in later life.

Martin Gottfried handles the Miller material with critical intelligence and sensitivity; Lahr's bio of Williams is the most intimate of the three; and the Gelbs the most definitive, though it does not go into detailed criticism of O'Neill's individual plays.  What happened after the 60s?  Well, a whole new style of American Theatre emerged, first influenced by European models (Edward Albee was an early product of this school), followed by a gritty naturalistic realism ("August Osage County" is a prime example) that would probably make Arthur Miller blush.  Will the 21st century produce another O'Neill-Miller-Williams trio?  Too early to tell, I think.  Certainly nothing comparable to their combined talents has emerged so far!