Progress and Parody in Resurrection Blues

Abstract

Since 1960s, at least in United States, Arthur Miller's plays have been liked but not well liked. His last plays, from 1990s and 2000s, have hardly been liked at all. This general disfavor with reviewers might be attributed to one of two reasons: either late play is too much like Miller's early great plays-the big four-or it is not like them enough. One critic dismissed Broken Glass, Miller's 1994 play about troubled Jewish marriage and philandering doctor in Brooklyn at time of Kristallnacht, as being Ibsenism by book (Richard 129), as if Miller slavishly replicated moral causation and social realism of A Doll's House (1879) and All My Sons (1947). Resurrection Blues, Miller's 2002 play about televised crucifixion of South American revolutionary who may be Messiah, has been dismissed as lame Monty Pythonism, as if Miller desecrated with satire his own reputation for high-minded political tragedy on order of The Crucible (1953) (Herman). Another critic, from United Kingdom where even Miller's late plays are usually very well liked, remarked that You don't really know what embarrassment is until you've witnessed [Maxmillian] Schell, as wicked dictator, lamenting his impotence with words: 'My dog won't go hunting anymore' (Spencer). An American critic who was trying to like Resurrection Blues as a bitter comedy about world that American century wrought, also regretted General Barriaux's sex jokes as juvenile and truly beneath playwright of Mr. Miller's (Weber).The General's line was funny in spring 2010 production of Resurrection Blues chanced to see in Chicago on Good Friday. Matt Welton played Felix Barriaux with persuasive comic-melodramatic consternation-as ruthless pragmatist surrounded by fucking idiots, as Felix suggests late in play, not as cartoon. Perhaps because Welton lacked Schell's stature didn't take character's lines to be an insult to actor. Perhaps line strikes me as funny because Felix is not joking and because euphemism is oddly in character. Felix is cross between or Juan Peron and one of Ibsen's autocratie Victorian prudes. In context, Felix's confession of impotence to his cousin Henri Schultz, wealthy pharmaceuticals distributor turned public intellectual, comes as disjunctive surprise. Neither impotence itself nor Felix's contradictory image comes as surprise; both matters are established by play's opening gambits. Felix acknowledges his impotence in his opening speech, on intercom with his secretary Isabelle, who appeared as busty silhouette in American premiere (see Weber) and whom he disappointed night before. With Isabelle he uses tone of macho dismissiveness: I want you to forget last night, agreed? (Miller, RB 5). His niece Jeanine, Henri's daughter, has already established his ruthlessness. Jeanine has attempted suicide, she explains in prologue Miller added after premiere American production, because her uncle spared her life when his soldiers annihilated her little brigade of revolutionaries: shot them all in thirty seconds, and not one of them over nineteen years old (RB 3).Felix Barriaux is Miller's contribution to long line of ruthless but comic stage despots who are politically, morally, and aesthetically problematic figures. Daniel Gerould notes W. H. Auden's contention that Hitler is no fit subject for humor [because] we cannot consider comic what we hate. On these grounds, comic despot who is both hateful and powerful becomes an impossibility. Gerould argues that the loathsome dictator is by his very nature grotesquely ludicrous, and terrible plight of tyrannized may well be equally preposterous (Gerould 4). Writing few years after The Crucible opened, Miller said that in retrospect he wishes that he had made Judge Danforth less human. I was wrong in mitigating evil of this man and judges he represents. …