Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change Alan Ackerman Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change. Edited by Enoch Brater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005; pp. xi + 268. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. This collection of essays is the culminating work of a conference held at the University of Michigan in 2000 to mark the eighty-fifth birthday of Arthur Miller and his long association with the university where he had been an undergraduate in the 1930s. The book both describes and testifies to Miller's continuing importance in and beyond the theatre in America and abroad. Enoch Brater's eloquent introduction ("Early Days, Early Works") details ways in which Miller's formative experiences at the University of Michigan in particular contributed to his commitment to questions of social justice. And the rich appreciation bestowed upon Miller both in the conference proceedings and in the resulting book has been repaid by the playwright, who wrote of those early days in Echoes Down the Corridors, "It was, in short, the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs and my ignorance, and it helped to lay out the boundaries of my life" (quoted in Brater 15). That warm sentiment is echoed in turn in an interview between Miller and Brater via satellite hookup to conclude both the conference and the book itself, though the book also includes a brief afterword by Mel Gussow praising Miller for being "timely and timeless" (259). Arthur Miller's America is an eclectic collection of essays on performance, theatre history, literary-cultural interpretation, pedagogy, and interviews with artists, most of which revolve around questions of historical specificity and boundary-crossing. At the center of the book are illuminating chapters by Laurence Goldstein ("The Misfits and American Culture") and Jonathan Freedman ("Miller, Monroe and the Remaking of Jewish Masculinity"), offering close readings of Miller's work and life as historical subjects. Goldstein self-consciously focuses on a movie that, unlike the plays, is never likely to be adapted or remade, writing that "the stubborn rootedness of The Misfits in all its forms in the soil of the late 1950s and early 1960s complicates our efforts to measure its continuing claims upon the public imagination in the early years of the twenty-first century" (110). In "Arthur Miller and the Drama of American Liberalism," Mike Sell's nuanced account of Miller's experiments in "moral form" in the context of crises in twentieth-century American Liberalism, asks just what kind of Liberal Miller is. Sell argues, in a manner that reflects smartly on this collection as a whole, that the tradition of Liberalism is "bound paradoxically both by concern for timeless values and by the abiding belief that such values can only be defined in the concrete political contexts and constraints of the moment" (25). Many of the contributions by theatre professionals and theatre historians describe the processes, challenges, and rewards of adapting Miller across diverse historical moments, national borders, genres, and media. Frank Gagliano describes a playwright's approach to adapting Miller's autobiography Timebends to the stage, though it concludes with a discouraging letter from Miller himself, and Peter Ferron gives an account of directing The American Clock. Revealing interviews with actor Patrick Stewart and composer William Bolscom address the interpretation of Miller onstage and in music. And Bolscom, who wrote an opera based on A View from the Bridge, notes the artistic-historical curiosity that so many have sought to adapt Miller's plays to music, though almost always against the playwright's wishes and with little box-office or artistic success, in spite of the musical nature of much of Miller's work. On the other hand, effective chapters by Ruby Cohn ("Manipulating Miller") and Deborah Geis ("In Willy Loman's Garden: Contemporary Re-visions of Death of a Salesman") show how adaptable Miller's dramas have been, whether, as Cohn shows, in making Death of a Salesman accessible to a Chinese audience or, as Geis demonstrates, in the diverse ways the play has been appropriated "as intertext for a surprising number of new theatrical works" (203). Toby Zinman...