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And it doesn't finish the picture of Monroe and Miller. Maybe it's the Pollyanna in me, but I'd have liked to see a third play on the subject, this one about their courtship. How did they meet? What needs did each one rouse in the other? Why did they think marriage would work? How did Miller propose to Marilyn? Were they great in bed? Granted, a man lacking in humor wasn't the one to write this play. (Paging the ghost of Preston Sturges.) But it would open a window on the strangest, least predictable part of their time together: when both dared, against all logic, to hope.
OUTLIVING FAME
All My Sons had run nine months on Broadway, Death a year and nine months. After that, no Miller play ran more than six months, except for The Price in 1968, and After the Fall (which was in repertory, so that's cheating). In comparison, Inge had three run more than a year (Picnic, Bus Stop and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs) as did Williams (The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Inge died in 1973, Williams in 1983, but their day as Broadway hitmakers was over by the end of the 50s. So was Miller's. The difference: he outlived his fashion by nearly a half-century.
He plugged away, writing shorter, leaner pieces. I found some of these later works attractive. In The Last Yankee, an hour-long, two-character chamber play that came out in 1993, a woman (Frances Conroy) who has been hospitalized for depression confronts the possibility of going home with her husband (John Heard). She seeks release from the ghosts of her golden youth. But wry or wistful, she speaks with the reckless lucidity of someone liberated from drugs and intoxicated by the impending peril of real life. "Sooner or later you just have to stand up and say, 'I'm normal, I made it,' " she says. "But it's like standing on top of a stairs, and there's no stairs."
In 1994, 50 years after his Broadway debut, Miller brought Broken Glass to town. This scalding drama had a healthy run in London and received an Olivier Award for best play. Yet, on Broadway, with Amy Irving as another crippled woman — crippled, literally, with obsession over Hitler's mistreatment of Jews — and Ron Rifkin as her raging, gelded bull of a husband, it lasted only two months. By this time, Miller's new plays didn't stay around nearly as long as the revivals of his old ones (A View from Bridge, with Anthony LaPaglia, had an eight-month run in 1997). Like Stephen Sondheim, whose early work is endlessly tributed but who can't get a new show to Broadway, Miller had become one of those national theatrical treasures more honored as nostalgia items than as practicing showmakers.
Yet he had learned a few things along the way. He knew that theater is, at heart, just people in a big room trying to talk — the characters with one another, the playwright with the audience. After a half-century of listening and talking, Miller had become comfortable with the stage's limits. In these two plays, he refined his best artistic tendencies. Mature artists often simplify, discard the old frills, decide what's worth saying as the clock ticks toward death. Miller in his late 70s had nothing to prove but much to tell, in a few words. Certainly The Last Yankee qualifies as prime old-man's art. It is just a sketch, really — some lines that reveal the contours of a soul. In his final days, Matisse did work like this.
He was looking for that elusive dramatic form, middle-class tragedy. He figured it needn't portray the fall of a king; it could be the look of moral failure, or social defeat, on the face of an office drudge staring out a 10th story window and musing on the terminal thrill of a 100-ft. swan dive onto asphalt. Miller acutely diagnosed Willy Loman's, America's, need to be not just "liked" but "well-liked." That need defined a half-century of social and political U.S. policy — until the Bush Administration substituted "feared" for "liked." The playwright would not have been surprised by one poll, around the time of his first fame, showing that 90% of Americans thought they were members of the middle class ... or by poll a few years ago, which had 20% of respondents declaring that they were in the top 1% income bracket!
In a country with an every-man-a-king theology the delusion of royalty is a powerful drug, a dangerous dream. And Miller argued that the fall, on waking up, can be fatal, can meet the demands of tragedy. So he sang the dirge for the Dream.
The dreamer didn't need to be of elevated status; it was poignant enough that he dreamed. As Linda Loman says just before Willy's death: "Don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."
And applause, applause must finally be granted to the playwright who preached and hectored until we finally got his sad, profound message.