Remembering Arthur Miller's legacy at 100

Elysa Gardner | @elysagardner, USA TODAY

No writer has probed this country's moral conscience more forcefully or relentlessly than Arthur Miller, who would have turned 100 on Oct. 17. With plays such as Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible and A View From the Bridge, Miller cast an unsparing light on issues troubling our national soul, while ennobling the men and women who struggled with them, however imperfectly.

His characters "were often fractured, but they were still men of ideals," says another Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Lynn Nottage (Ruined, Meet Vera Stark), who wrote the foreword to The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, released this week. Adds Michael Wilson, who is directing an off-Broadway production of Miller's Incident at Vichy for Signature Theatre this fall, "He took classic tragedy and transmuted it to the common man, making it democratic and accessible and essential for all of us."

Vichy is among a number of works being revived in the coming year to commemorate the centennial. (Miller died in 2005 at age 89.) Belgian director Ivan van Hove's acclaimed, London-based revival of View begins previews at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre on Oct. 21; a new Broadway staging of Crucible, also by van Hove, is set to start performances in February.

Outside New York, Miller's legacy is being honored with productions, events and festivals by organizations ranging from Seattle Repertory Theatre to Cité des Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana. Reaching a wide and diverse audience was important to Miller, who, Wilson notes, "hated the idea of theater being an elitist art form for wealthy people."

In Salesman and Sons in particular, Miller showed how capitalism, a system ostensibly designed to promote the individual, could crush those it promised to empower. In his new book Joy Ride: Show People & Their Shows, The New Yorker critic John Lahr, biographer of another iconic American playwright, Tennessee Williams, writes that Salesman "was the first play to dramatize (the) punishing -- and particularly American -- interplay between panic and achievement," and that in its tragic protagonist, Willy Loman, "Miller was able to bring both the desperation and the aspiration of American life together in one character."

Born into a Jewish family that prospered before being financially devastated by the stock-market crash that precipitated the Great Depression, Miller "was aware of inequity in ways that people who hadn't experienced it first-hand couldn't be," Nottage notes. "He understood and showed us how elusive the American dream could be."

Miller also defended the right to personal and creative expression, at his own peril. When the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating artists and writers under suspicion of Communist activity, Miller not only refused to name names -- as his close colleague Elia Kazan had done, leading to a long period of estrangement between the director and playwright -- but engaged in social protest through his writing. Miller adapted Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in 1950, Nottage writes in her foreword, "as a way of speaking out against the badgering and bullying of the creative and intellectual communities."

Crucible, which finds obvious allegorical value in the late-17th-century Salem witch trials, followed in 1953. It continues to be one of Miller's most popular plays, and not just in the USA. Julia Bolus, who was Miller's assistant and is director of the Arthur Miller Trust, notes, "The Crucible is being performed almost somewhere around the world at all times."

Certainly, Miller's accounts of the search for integrity and justice were not intended for American audiences only. Vichy, set in the titular French city, examines the anti-Semitism that led to genocide under the Nazis. And the emotional and moral quandaries faced in his plays have universal resonance, from View to After the Fall -- informed by Miller's much-examined second marriage, to Marilyn Monroe -- to later works such as The Ride Down St. Morgan (1991) and Resurrection Blues (2002).

Wilson notes there was a "shameful period," in the 1980s and '90s, when Miller "was produced in England more than he was here. He was marginalized around the same time Tennessee Williams and Horton Foote were, pushed aside as too conventional. I'm sure that was painful for Arthur."

Miller welcomed and cultivated the international recognition, though, even directing a Chinese-language production of Salesman in 1983. Next year will mark the first publication of "Salesman" In Beijing, Miller's account of that experience, in France. 2016 will also bring Miller's autobiography, Timebends, and his collected stories, Presence, to China, and will find Salesman and Crucible published in Albanian.

Every year, Bolus says, Miller's work is translated, published and performed "in languages and for countries where the plays have never existed in that language before." Which would have suited him: "He lived in a way that was very connected to the world and what was happening in the world."

Wilson acknowledges that, in the end, Miller "may have helped affect change on an international level even more than on American soil." But he adds, "We'll always cling to him as a hero."