Responses to an Audience Question & Answer Session
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(On the morning of April 18th, 1998, during the Arthur Miller Symposium at the University of Evansville in Indiana, Arthur Miller came downstage in the Shanklin Theatre to answer questions from the conference audience. After a brief introduction by the symposium host, Professor Margaret McMullan, Arthur Miller took his first question.)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What has impressed you about different actors' interpretations of Willy Loman, such as Dustin Hoffman or Lee J. Cobb?
ARTHUR MILLER: Well, it's always the difference in the personalities of the actors. One actor might have a good sense of humor, while another might not; one might be better and more passionate in the big scenes, while the other might do better at the low-key scenes. It's really a question of personalities, and nobody's got it all. So it's always a trade-off. With one actor you might lose a certain sense of grandeur, but instead you get a remarkable verisimilitude, and he becomes more easily identified with the role. When you're casting people, you're always making these kinds of trade-offs, because there's no one actor who can do it all. And that's true of any kind of art which relies on interpretation. It's the same thing with violinists or dancers. The only art that doesn't require that kind of interpretation is the novel. But if there is an interpreter, then you're going to win some and lose some. Hopefully, you'll win more than you lose, but that's not always true. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Where do you get your ideas?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: In your most recent play, Mr. Peters' Connections, the main character keeps asking the question, "What is the subject?" Is it your sense that there might not be a subject? And is that a problem peculiar to the late twentieth century?
ARTHUR MILLER: Yes, I think it's more of a problem now, but it's always been a problem, of course. It's a fundamental condition of human existence that it takes us a long time to arrive at the point where we can know what the "main thing" is—the crux or the hub of the wheel. Generally in life, one thing happens after another, and there's no conscious accretion of any kind of meaning. In my latest play, Mr. Peters is facing his death with a mixture of cheerfulness and despair, trying desperately to figure out what everything means. That's harder to do in our present times because our past conventions have largely collapsed. In the past, we had the conventions of the church, which always handled the meaning of existence, and for most people that was enough. Even then, there was always a minority of people unhappy with the conventional answers, but, nowadays, there are many more people walking around who feel out of touch with these conventions. All they have in their lives is entertainment. They're not consulting spiritual advisors; they're watching television. And I don't think that we're going to get many answers out of television. So there's a widespread feeling that life has no essential meaning.
It also comes, I believe, from the fact that we human beings kill so many other people. We've murdered millions of people in the last sixty years, maybe more than ever before in history. We're certainly conscious of it, but we don't know how to handle that consciousness. We simply don't know how to react to it anymore, and, I think, lodging deep within all of us somewhere, even if we're not particularly involved ourselves, is a certain fear that the human being isn't worth very much. After all, a few years ago, several million people in Rwanda were murdered in a period of three or four months, and the United States and the European countries were all warned in advance that this was going to happen, and nobody did a thing. It's only now that there's some futile mutterings about it. That's millions of people, probably most of them women and children and old people. All these things lodge deeply in the human psyche. We're not always conscious of it, but I'm convinced it's there, and it diminishes our grasp on the importance of life. So that's in the play. Mr. Peters isn't consciously dealing with it, but he's desperately striving for some kind of redemption, some holiness, connected with human life. At the end of the play, he takes a step toward finding it, but it's very difficult.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. Miller, when your plays are being produced, are you often in rehearsal, and what do you do there, and do you enjoy it?
ARTHUR MILLER: I'm in rehearsal quite a lot. I'm always there for the first week or so while they're discovering the play, so that I can tell them what I think something should sound like—or give them shortcuts about what something means so they don't have to fumble around searching for it. After that, though, I try to stay away as much as possible, because I think there should be only one director, and if the actors start looking to me as well as the director, a kind of diffusion of authority takes place, and they donknow who to believe. Even if I don't agree with the director at some point, I'd still rather not split the authority between us. So, after the first week, I come back every few days or so, and then I hang around more intensely during the last week of rehearsals. And that's about it. What I generally do is just sit there and worry and try to be useful. A lot of times things are happening that I never dreamed would happen. Actors are marvelous at giving you surprises, and that's interesting and lovely. But sometimes the surprises are the wrong ones, so you have to stop them before they get rooted into the performance. Generally, though, I'm just there to be there. After a while, I become less anxious, and I'm just doing my best to stay awake. But it's fun, and I like it. It's certainly better than not doing it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: In James Goode's The Making of The Misfits, he claimed that you were kept quite busy on the set of The Misfits rewriting Marilyn's lines. Do you have any comment on that?
ARTHUR MILLER: Well, it wasn't just Marilyn's lines. We were shooting a big picture in an open country, and all kinds of new opportunities began to appear, and we wanted to take advantage of them. So a lot of changes took place, especially in the last fifteen minutes of the film, and I did rewrite many of those scenes on the set.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do you find most difficult or most challenging in writing a play?
ARTHUR MILLER: You've got to find the end. The end is everything. But most experiences in life don't end neatly, except when there's a suicide or a murder. Real life isn't comfortable being boxed in, so that may be the most intriguing and difficult challenge for the writer—to tell a story with the proper closure.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's been my great pleasure to teach Death of a Salesman and The Crucible for over thirty-five years, but one of the things I've noticed is that, as the role of women has changed in our society, students' perceptions of Linda have changed significantly. They find it morally reprehensible that she doesn't, more aggressively, interfere with the moral education of her sons. So I'm wondering, how would you explain Linda to modern young people?
ARTHUR MILLER: Of course, she's a woman of that particular era, but I don't think she's that much different from a lot of women in this era. She sees her function as serving as a silent, behind-the-scenes controller. It's very important to understand that Linda is aware of the real story from the moment the curtain goes up. She knows that Willy's suicidal, and when you're living with a suicidal person, you tread very carefully, because you realize how delicate his hold on life really is. If you make a single misstep, you could send him overboard, and that's true in today's world as well. I think there's currently a certain amount of standardized thinking in relation to that character. People would like to think that a woman could simply engineer the whole situation, but she can't. And neither could a man. When you're dealing with delicate mental imbalance, you have to be very careful. On the other hand, when Linda's alone with her sons, we can see the power of her feelings—as in the scene where she explains to the boys that Willy is on the edge of his life. I regard Linda as a very admirable person. Outwardly, she's suffering more than anyone else in the play, and she's also doing more, in her own way, to prevent the coming catastrophe. So I really don't understand this contemporary attitude about her, except that it's probably what the attitude has to be in this particular period. It's simply a pro forma reaction, from my point of view.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. Miller, you've been very busy in the '90s, writing at least four plays and the screenplay for The Crucible. What do you do for fun?
ARTHUR MILLER: I work. Although, it seems to me, I don't do as much as I could. I live in the country, and I wander around a lot, staring into space. I also fiddle around in the house, and we have lots of good friends. They come over, and we waste some time that way. I also make furniture now and then. I have a very nice shop. And I have children who call me up and make problems, and so on. I do what most people do who don't have to go to the office. That's the greatest thing about my profession—I can stay home. And that's what I do, and there's a lot of fun in it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: In an essay by fellow playwright David Mamet about Death of aSalesman, he wrote: "the greatest American play, arguably, is the story of a Jew told by a Jew and cast in "universal" terms. Willy Loman is a Jew in a Jewish industry. But he is never identified as such. His story is never avowed as a Jewish story, and so a great contribution to Jewish American history is lost. It's lost to culture as a whole, and, more importantly, it's lost to the Jews, its rightful owners." I wonder how you feel about that?
ARTHUR MILLER: Well, he got it, so it couldn't have been lost. I mean, what more could anyone want?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: These days, more people will encounter your plays through video and movies than through actually seeing them performed on stage. I wonder if knowing that fact has caused you, in any way, to change your writing style over the last twenty or thirty years?
ARTHUR MILLER: That's a difficult question. I'm sure that the impact of film, which is so overwhelming, must have had an effect on the way I see the theater. Even way back in 1948 when I wrote Salesman, it had a very cinematic construction. I never thought about it at the time, but I definitely think it's true now. There are scenes constantly fading in and out of each other, and the whole play can practically be shot the way it was originally written. So I was probably always influenced by film and film-making techniques, even when I wasn't fully aware of it. But after Salesman, I did other plays like The Crucible, which have no film-like qualities at all, so it's a hard question for me to answer. I suspect that something as important as film certainly has had its effect on my work, but what exactly it is, I'm not able to tell you. My latest play, Mr.Peters' Connections, doesn't have much cinematic influence at all, but the next one might, if I ever finish it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is there any particular character in your plays that you feel closest to, either because the character is autobiographical or because he stands for what you feel most strongly about?
ARTHUR MILLER: I would say all of them. There's no one who's actually me, that I'm sure of. But a writer projects himself into every one of his characters—you can't write convincingly about a character unless you identify with him. There are, for example, many new characters whom I can easily conjure up, but I really can't write about them because I'm unable to absorb their personalities into my own. So if you see any characters in my plays who have any life in them, it's because the character is part of me. And I think that's probably true of most writers. That's the miracle of Shakespeare—that he was able to put himself into such a wide variety of characters.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Bouncing off the previous question, are there particular people from your past that became characters in your plays?
ARTHUR MILLER: Yes, characters are always pieces of real people, but they're also created by the play itself. Often, for me, characters are first created by auditory means. I might, for example, hear a line spoken by someone on a subway, and around that line a certain accretion of a character begins to form, like a pearl around a grain of sand. But there are very few characters that I've ever written that were outright mimicry of real people. The reason is that once you take a character and put him into a different context than his own, you have to change him. I can't imagine that any of the original sources for any of my characters would be able to recognize themselves in my plays. I'll tell you a quick story about that. Years ago, I spent some time in Nevada, and I got to know some cowboys who were running horses. They would go up into the mountains and capture wild mustangs and then sell them. One of these men interested me quite a bit, and it's out of him that the character Clark Gable played in The Misfits, Gay Langland, was created. Then three or four years later, when we were shooting scenes for The Misfits in Nevada, I saw the same cowboy standing in a little crowd of local people, watching the shooting of the movie. I hadn't seen him in all those years, but I still thought I had him down pretty well in Gable's character. But now he was standing there watching everything, and listening to his own dialogue, and he didn't recognize any of it. Something happened between the time that I first heard him speak and heard his story—which is actually very close to the story that's in the screenplay and the movie—and the final portrayal of the fictional character of Gay Langland. So it's not a case of reportage. Writing isn't a camera. It's a poetic enterprise, and that leaves us pretty much in the dark as far as I'm concerned. So even though there's definitely a relation between the source and the final character, it isn't very direct.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Earlier in your career you collaborated with a number of people—most notably Elia Kazan and Arthur Kennedy. How do you feel about working in repertory?
ARTHUR MILLER: I was there when Bob Whitehead and Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman were planning to start an American National Theatre along the lines of the British National Theatre. Since they all came out of the Group Theatre, which was a repertory company, they felt very strongly that that was the way to go. I'd had no such experience myself, but there were great advantages in having such a company. One of them was that they could work together with ease; they all knew each other, and they helped each other a lot. Rehearsals went on and on—long after the rehearsal period—and since they were always together, they could really interact and make their characters come alive. The disadvantage, of course, is that they might get a play which is hard to cast—where you really don't have a member of the group who's quite right for the role—but you have to use him anyway. And that's not a good idea. But I still thought the National Theatre concept was a very interesting and hopeful possibility, especially since I'd always been uncomfortable with the commercial theater.
But, to explain it in a few words, the people who built Lincoln Center were mostly bankers who wouldn't consider paying salaries to actors. You can't hang a plaque on the back of an actor, and say the National City Bank is paying him, but you can hang one on a building. So they never did go through with the original proposal. But I must admit, I don't think that, in our time, such a theater is possible anymore, and I say that because the theater nowadays is really a way station for the movies. There's no point in denying that anymore. The high ambition of almost all the actors I know is to become movie stars. There's more money in it, there's more fame, and there's even more interesting work to be done in film than there is in the theater. As a result, you could never hold together a mature acting company. You could do so with young people who haven't had their break yet. But once the break happens, it's impossible to hold it together. Even the National Theatre in England, for example, no longer has a company. They hire actors for each production. Surely, if anybody could've done it, they could've done it, and they did in the beginning, but they couldn't continue it. There's simply too much opportunity in film and television to hold onto the successful actors.
So it's not really a feasible way to go. What is feasible, which we don't do, is simply to provide enough money for a certain number of theaters in the country to operate as art theaters, so that they can produce a high-level theater. This would allow us to develop a core of serious, mature actors for the professional theater. We're constantly amazed in New York when some English or French company comes over with grown-up people playing on a level that we Americans can't match, and it's simply because they've been developing that talent, and we haven't. We're bursting with talent in New York, but it's all young talent that will soon move on to Hollywood. In my opinion, there's very little matured talent, and that's the price we pay for our commercial theater. Currently, there are a few attempts—like the Signature Theatre in New York which does serious plays—to alleviate the problem, and they do to a degree. But it's not on any systematic level, and it's all touch and go because they lack the money to produce their plays. It costs lots of money. So we're suffering, in my opinion, due to the absence of any state or federal money on a sufficient level to float such enterprises. We need mature actors, but we won't be able to develop them if they can't make a living in the theater.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Since you successfully directed Salesman in Beijing, I wonder why you don't direct more often?
ARTHUR MILLER: To tell you the truth, I get bored listening to the same thing every day. I also lack that special kind of patience to deal with actors that good directors need. Temperamentally, it's just not my line of work. I'd rather have somebody else come in with a fresh eye and do something marvelous and amaze me. It happens every once in a while. Besides, I'm lazy. I'd rather get up in the morning, think about all those people working hard at the theater, and read my paper and think about life. I just don't feel like going down there every day. I've done it, and I can't say that I enjoyed it. So why do it? Especially when other people love to do it and can do it better than I can.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What's the secret to your long and creative life?
ARTHUR MILLER: Well, I selected good parents. I really don't know, it's just luck, like most things in life. I've lived a long time, and I can't think of any other reason. It's inexplicable, as far as I'm concerned.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What are you still interested in doing, either professionally or personally, that you haven't already done?
ARTHUR MILLER: I'm not sure. I usually live in a kind of semi-darkness, wandering around trying to figure out who I am. I have no specific plot or plan, except to greet each day and stay afloat. I do have another play, which I'm about halfway through, but I don't know that I'll ever discover the "secret" of it. I haven't yet, but it's still interesting to me; so maybe I'll go back to it, finish it off, and keep the critics happy. But that's about it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What's the most memorable event in your life, or do you believe it's yet to come?
ARTHUR MILLER: I don't know—I'd answer if I could. I can't think of any one thing. I've had a lot of memorable things happen in my life, and maybe that's why I can't find one in particular. Anytime I finish a work is very memorable, or whenever my wife thinks I did something O.K.—which happens about once a week. But aside from that, I can't really satisfy the question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What was your relationship with Tennessee Williams, and did you learn from each other?
ARTHUR MILLER: He wasn't in New York very much during the years that I knew him. He was always in Florida, or in Europe, or California, or someplace else. So we never became close friends, but I saw him a dozen or more times. We certainly had great sympathy for each other. It's mostly forgotten now, but people were always taking potshots at the both of us, and we sort of commiserated with each other. And I did learn things from Tennessee, although I'm not sure if he learned anything from me. His early plays, especially Streetcar, were truly unique. It's not fully appreciated now, but before Williams, the full-throated voice of the author was muted on the American stage. The author of a play in America was supposed to be practically non-existent as far as the language was concerned. If you read the American play before Williams, with the sometimes exception of O'Neill, it's always an attempt to imitate street speech, that is, ordinary daylight speech. But Tennessee infused his plays with his own poetry, and he did it blatantly. People never really spoke the way they did in Tennessee's plays, but it didn't matter, because the intentions, meanings, and emotional lives in those plays were obviously widespread among the audience, and he gave it his own twist. The only other writer—one of a quite different temperament—to attempt a similar thing was Clifford Odets. Odets wrote a dialogue that never existed on heaven or earth. His characters were supposed to be Bronx Jews, but no Bronx Jew that I knew ever talked like that. Odets intentionally tried to create a poetic diction in the theater, rather than a naturalistic one, and he sometimes succeeded, although sometimes he got quite mannered. And Tennessee could also be quite mannered from time to time. He's easy to mock or parody because of the high inflection of his language. But it was a liberating force on the whole, especially in his early plays, and I felt the impact.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Since so many of our playwrights leave the theater and become screenwriters, what's kept you in the theater?
ARTHUR MILLER: It was the horror of thinking that you were writing something that would be immediately owned by somebody else. When I was coming up, there was no independent film production. You worked for a studio, and if you did that kind of work, they could do whatever they wished with whatever you wrote. And that was an idea I simply couldn't swallow. It paralyzed me. I wouldn't have been able to write a line. So the movies, as far as I was concerned, were out. I did work, in desperation, for some money in radio, writing some silly radio plays for Cavalcade of America, the Dupont Company, U.S. Steel, and so on, just to make a living. And I really didn't care very much whether they changed them or not. In the past, Faulkner had made some money writing Western stories under various names, and Fitzgerald did stupid stories for specialty magazines. For my generation, it was radio. But writing movies for the studios always seemed impossible to me. Nobody goes to a movie to see the work of a screenwriter. Most people don't even realize that the screenwriter exists. They think the actors make it all up as they go along. So, for me, it was much better to stay home and struggle with the theater. The theater's a much simpler operation. All you need is a director and some actors and a place to act, but in the movies you write a page of script and a whole army comes out of the woodwork. I'm always astonished, the few times that I've worked on films, at the sheer number of people involved in the production. Sometimes film's very nice to think about, but I'd much prefer the simpler way—showing the actor through my lines what should be said and leaving it at that. It's what I've always enjoyed—writing for the American theater.
