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Arthur Miller
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Having brought A View from the Bridge to vivid life, Michael Mayer now directs Roundabout’s new production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall.
an interview by Randy Gener
Quentin, the central character of After the Fall, is not your average autobiographical character. He’s a Jewish intellectual with two failed marriages, a mother who recently died, and a radical past. Quentin is a man in a state of spiritual crisis. He lives in a self-destructive world where there is betrayal and deceit on both a personal and a grand scale, and he feels stuck. “I don’t know if I have lived in good faith,” Quentin confesses. On the verge of a third marriage, Quentin finds that he cannot accept the love of Holga, a new woman in his life, if he is not able to accept the part he played in the betrayals he has endured and perpetrated on others. Although Quentin is distinct from his author (Miller never was a liberal attorney, for example), he does reflect the playwright’s audacity.
The play was originally written in 1964 for the late Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, and staged for the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, housed temporarily at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre in New York City, with Jason Robards as Quentin and Barbara Loden as Maggie. Director Michael Mayer, who led the Tony-winning Broadway revival of A View from the Bridge, has cast Peter Krause (of HBO’s “Six Feet Under”) as Quentin and Carla Gugino as Maggie. It will be the play’s first major Broadway revival in almost 40 years.
“The play, after all, is taking place in the rubble,
in the ruins of values.”
—Arthur Miller
In his foreword, Miller explains that Quentin is faced with “what Eve brought to Adam—the terrifying fact of choice. Where choice begins, Paradise ends.” In a phone conversation with Front & Center, Arthur Miller and Michael Mayer talked about some of their choices for this revival.
John Cullum in All My Sons
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FRONT & CENTER: In many interviews, you’ve mentioned that After the Fall is due another re-assessment. Roundabout revived All My Sons in 1997, Michael’s Tony-winning production of A View from the Bridge in 1998, and The Man Who Had All the Luck in 2001. Many of your other early works have been given major Broadway revivals—Death of a Salesman (twice), The Price, and The Crucible. Why is After the Fall the play that, in a sense, got away?
ARTHUR MILLER: Well, the first critics and detractors made the whole thing to be about Marilyn Monroe. Of course, that’s not what the play was about, but it was foolish for me to imagine that I could prevent them or distract them from that easy-out analysis. They didn’t have to confront what the thing was really about. It’s not an easy vista, this play. There’s a threatening idea in it. It’s not comfortable because it suggests a moral culpability that most of us are not comfortable with facing. They decided that they weren’t culpable, that the whole thing was not interesting. However, it’s been done in various parts of the world and, indeed, here in the United States, too. They seem to be aware now that the play is about something else. I presume that that will happen with this production
MICHAEL MAYER: I hope so.
Michael, on opening night of A View from the Bridge, when it moved from the Roundabout to Broadway, you told Miller that you wanted to tackle After the Fall next. Why was this the play you wanted to do next?
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Chris O'Donnell and Samantha Mathis in The Man Who Had All The Luck
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MAYER: Like View from the Bridge, I felt the production history of After the Fall didn’t do the work full service and that the play was ahead of its time. I think that theatregoers today can accept the structural or idiosyncratic form of the play. When it came out, there was too much attention placed on the autobiographical elements and too much attention on the formal structure of the text, because it was new. An audience today can let go of the autobiography and accept the formal structure, which is not stream of consciousness. It uses the tools of surrealism, the juxtaposition of images and scenes, the seemingly chaotic nature of Quentin’s thought processes. The structure is complicated, and in 1964 it became an issue, as opposed to what the actual scenes mean.
There is this image of a concentration camp watchtower in the script that looms in the dark, suggesting a symbolic connection between Quentin’s private life and his public life, with society and politics. Can you address how those connections are drawn in the play?
MILLER: The connections are numerous. This is not a realistic play, and it is not a memory play. It is a cracked vase, where the pieces must be held in place, lest it fall apart. This is a play that reflects the world as one man saw it. The mounting awareness of this man is the issue, and as it approaches agony to him, the audience is to be enlarged in its consciousness of what is happening. One of these connections is that Quentin sees in those concentration-camp images the possibility of his own moral culpability in relation to that. That is to say, he imagines he would be relieved if he were not picked up and not put in a concentration camp. He would rather be a survivor, even as his sympathy goes out to the Jewish prisoners. But he has greater sympathy for himself. This refers, of course, to his life with Maggie. On the one hand, he is glad that he survived it—that he was not dragged down to his death by hers.
MAYER: Also, this exists in Quentin’s relationship to Lou, his friend who is accused of being a Communist. When Lou commits suicide, Quentin has a moment of unlimited relief; he actually acknowledges that he thought, “It could have been me”—as horrible as that is.
Anthony LaPaglia and Allison Janney in A View From The Bridge
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MILLER: Yes. The line in the play is: “And I am not alone, and no man lives who would not rather be the sole survivor of this place than all its finest victims! What is the cure? Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls?” It’s a kind of survivor guilt.
MAYER: Big time.
MILLER: It’s what’s involved in Quentin’s relationship to Maggie….
MAYER: ….And his mother. Also, it’s in his relationship with his first wife, Louise. Quentin survived the divorce. We don’t really know how she dealt with it. Quentin moves on, but we never see Louise move on. She’s still wherever she was when they split.
Michael, you’ve said that when you were working on the readings of After the Fall in preparation for the production, you and the actors found a lot of contemporary resonance in the play. Can you speak about this?
MAYER: The last time I thought of After the Fall’s continuing relevance was when we were sitting in your apartment, Arthur. We were talking about what was going to happen to the United States. Arthur said, “You know, I’ve never been as discouraged as I am right now.” The remark sent chills down my spine. Arthur, you have lived through such a big chunk of the 20th century! You’ve seen so much; you’ve written about it. For me to hear that statement from you at the beginning of the 21st century was pretty devastating.
“…The play addresses concerns that all Americans have right now in our world: issues of power, responsibility, guilt, innocence… ”
– Michael Mayer
MILLER: What I was probably reacting to is the relentless destruction of the definition of language. Take this latest scandal. The administration’s first reaction to the revelation that some American army people have been treating Iraqi captives in a completely horrible and disastrous way was that this event was an exception. The first reaction of some members of Congress, who were, at last, reacting to what was happening in the war, was quite the opposite; they said this had to have happened with some consent from above. That’s why I felt so despairing. You can’t have a debate if we don’t agree with certain definitions of terms. It’s a lion talking to a zebra. You’re shadowboxing in a shadow land. One of the reasons I think, incidentally, that this kind of theatre is important is that it makes language definite again. It gives us a definition of what people are saying. You can’t have a play, especially like After the Fall, if it is going to be mushy—if the language is not going to be respected.
I was turning in my mind the remarkable first line of the play: “Hello! God, it’s good to see you again!” Quentin is addressing a Listener, who, according to the script, may be seen or unseen. Elia Kazan decided that the Listener was a psychoanalyst. But this Listener could be a friend or Quentin could be talking to God or a judge. Who is this Listener?
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Debra Mooney, Eli Wallach, Hector Elizaondo and Joe Spano in The Price
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MAYER: Quentin speaks directly to the audience. We’re not going to be ambiguous about that in this production. To use the device of the Listener is not immediate enough. Another thing that you can say is revisionist about my production is that the action of the whole play literally takes place in a specific location: an airport terminal at JFK. When I boiled it down, the play takes place during the moments Quentin is preparing to meet Holga in New York City in 1962. The design Richard Hoover and I came up with very specifically situates the play at a TWA terminal at Kennedy, which we discovered was built in May of 1962. In my mind, the play starts in the fall of that year, a few months after the terminal was built, and it was sleek, brand new and very beautiful. This design lends itself to the transformational quality that you want from the rest of the play, until Holga arrives at the Kennedy airport and greets him, “Hello.”
As I was looking through Inge’s photography work, I ran across this book where she recorded these border areas. [Inge Morath, who passed away in 2002, was Miller’s third wife, and Last Journeys was her 2002 photographic and filmed record of her travels to the borderlands of southern Styria and Slovenia]. She made a very special search for her family’s roots across the borders. I thought—Wow, Inge took pictures about the issues of borders. Her project confirmed my idea of locating the production in an airport terminal, which came from the text. What is an airport but a border between two places?
Since Miller dedicates the play to Inge Morath I am dedicating this production to her. I love the idea that her own work as an artist also spoke to some of the themes in the play, in particular the idea of borders in the mind being the most lethal borders that exist.
Unlike Willy Loman or John Proctor, Quentin doesn’t die; he’s not a tragic hero in the traditional dramatic sense. He survives. I feel that this theme of redemption, this groping toward healing and rehabilitation, marks this play as different from your previous plays.
MILLER: That’s right.
MAYER: That’s Holga—I think she represents that. She’s learned something; she talks so beautifully about it in that great speech where she says, “It’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside one’s self. One day the house smells of fresh bread, the next of smoke and blood. One day you faint because the gardener cut his finger off, within a week you’re climbing over the corpses of children bombed in a subway.” She has really been through a horrific experience with the Nazis. She has figured out how to live with uncertainty, without those rules in place, without having to label something as innocent.
MILLER: The play, after all, is taking place in the rubble, in the ruins of values. These people are picking their way through fallen edifices of various kinds that were once thought to be indestructible. They’ve got to re-invent human life.
Mayer and Miller at the opening night of A View From The Bridge
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In preparing for this production, you moved around certain scenes and cut speeches. Can you explain your rationale for this?
MAYER: There are three different versions of the play that have been performed since the original published version of the text. There was even a version that was published after the original Lincoln Center Repertory production. Over the last three years, I have put together, with Arthur’s blessing, the version that I think is the best—all the good parts. In the first reading of the play, I cut the character of Felice, because I felt that she was not intrinsic to the story. Arthur did not miss her at all. I’d say that’s the biggest single cut I made. Between the first and second readings, again with Arthur’s blessing, I re-ordered certain scenes to make what is now a more dynamic shift in consciousness as Quentin progresses in the play from issues of guilt to issues of power.
You confront aspects of yourself onstage that must be difficult. What is the value of living your life in such a public way?
MILLER: The link between the private and the public life is what is involved in the big drama of our civilization. Hamlet is not just a fellow; he’s also the heir to the Danish throne. Macbeth is the king of a country; he’s like the president of the United States, and when he goes down, a lot—a whole kingdom—goes down with him. When Oedipus discovers the truth about himself in the Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, he tears out his eyes, because he’s the head of the country. Drama is not a private matter completely. This position goes back a long way.
What do both of you hope for this new production of After the Fall? Do you hope audiences will find sympathy or compassion or understanding for the plight of Quentin?
MILLER: To contemplate our own involvement in evil wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would be worth having done this. It’s a human story, basically. People can take from it what they take from it, or what they are capable of taking from it. It is a play about the inability of man to live with the good and evil in his own nature. It is about denial. Through the play, Quentin comes to realize not his innocence, but his part in the evil he sees.
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The cast of The Crucible
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MAYER: It’s what Quentin says to Maggie in the second act: “Do the hardest thing of all—see your own hatred and live!” If she could just see the hatred that she has inside her, then she could be saved. I feel like if we could see the hatred in ourselves, then we could love each other. You have to be able to acknowledge that we are capable of murder. That’s what Quentin comes to realize—that he could kill. That’s a terrifying thing for us to acknowledge, but that’s what we have to do. Until we can acknowledge that we are perpetuating certain acts in the name of the United States, how do you stop it, in the most completely immediate sense?
MILLER: That’s why for a lot of people the play is so difficult to confront. It’s been difficult for me to confront. I was reading a big article in a magazine the other day. In some counties of the U.S., 30 percent of the people are in prison. Can you imagine that? We have the largest prison population in the world. It has become an industry for many communities who want it because it creates jobs. When you contemplate a thing like that you have to step outside and look at it. This play is about personal relationships, but it’s also about finding some viable synthesis of the chaos of experience instead of just roaming around in the experience.
MAYER: It’s about how the personal and the political intersect. There are so few plays that really embrace that, I think. The burden of directing a revival of a play like After the Fall is very different. What gives me a lot of energy in doing it is that the play addresses concerns that all Americans have right now in our world: issues of power, responsibility, guilt, innocence and, as Arthur puts it, the abasement of language that the current administration is doing on a daily basis. The play talks a lot about death, and right now Americans have spilled a lot of blood on their hands. It’s a very good time for Quentin to talk. That’s one of the reasons we’re not using the device of the Listener. Direct address is powerful right now in our history. We, as Americans, have a lot of decisions to make. Quentin, too, says, “I have a lot of decisions to make.” That’s an understatement. Sometimes looking inward at our own darkness is the thing that’s the hardest to do–yet it’s the thing that may save us.
Randy Gener is the associate editor of American Theatre and has written and directed his own plays, including Love Seats for Virginia Woolf and What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces.
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