AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTHUR MILLER

In April of 2004 Arthur Miller, a loyal alumnus, made the last of many visits to the
University of Michigan. Students had prepared a performance of scenes from his plays
for the occasion, and Miller visited a rehearsal and spoke with them about their work.
He conferred with administrators about plans to build the Arthur Miller Theatre on
campus, a project that has reached completion and is scheduled to open next season
with a production of Playing for Time. During his visit Mark Lamos, who had directed
Millers work in the past, hosted a symposium for the author at the Lydia Mendelssohn
Theatre. The following transcript of their conversation was prepared by Ayelet Ammitay
of the MQR sta.

Arthur Miller speaking in the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater during his last visit to Ann

Arbor, 2004

[Standing ovation]

ml: The last time you were on this stage did you get that kind of a response?
am: Nobody knew I was there [laughter]. I was on this stage . . . well, its a hundred
years ago. I played a bishop in Henry the Eighth and, thank God, had no lines. But I
had a big hat. On cue I walked on stage, with about eight other bishops who were
consecrating Henrys marriage, or one of them, and on cue we all had had to go like
that [bows] and I did.
ml: I suppose I should say welcome home, because the university had a kind of
immense influence on you as a young man. And I wonder how much of your artistic
vision was based on your experiences here. You said, I loved the idea of being
separated from the nation by leaving Brooklyn and coming to Ann Arbor, because the
spirit of the nation like its soil was being blown by crazy winds.
You said, My aection for the University of Michigan was due simply to their
accepting me. They had already turned me down twice because of my academic
record. I had flunked algebra three times in my Brooklyn high school. It was so low
as to be practically invisible. But the dean reversed himself after two letters, in which
I wrote that since working for two years in a warehouse at fifteen dollars a week, I
had turned into a much more serious fellow. He said he would give me a try, but I
had better make some grades. I could not conceive of a dean at Columbia or
Harvard doing that. When I arrived in 1934, at the bottom of the Depression, I fell in
love with the place, groggy as I was from the bus ride, because I was out of the
warehouse at last and at least formally part of a beautiful town, the college town of
Ann Arbor.
Youve said that the function of the writer is to remember, to be a rememberer. What
are your memories of the place ohand?
am: Well, the first experience I had of Ann Arbor was, in those days, you had a cheap
bus from New York to wherever you were going. It cost twelve dollars to go from New
York to Ann Arbor. But, on the way, [the driver] had passengers to drop o in some
place in Pennsylvania, another place in New Jersey, somewhere in Ohio. He just
wandered around and at one point got caught in a field; he got lost. By the time I got
here I must have been on that bus for, I dont know, two days. I was simply cross-

eyed. I got out of the bus, and I had never been in a taxi of course, but I saw a line of
taxis. I got in one taxi and I said, Im supposed to go to the Michigan Union and he
said OK. We drove around for a few minutes and he brought me, I thought, back to
where we had started [laughter]. But I was so tired that I couldnt be sure. (Two or
three years passed, and one day I was walking past the Michigan Union and I saw a
line of cabs and I thought, that guy took me around the block!) But I was grateful
anyway. I got a room from a Mrs. Nelson. It was the first room that I looked at but I
saw that bed and I said, this is it, Ill take this. The next thing I knew, somebody was
shaking me. I opened my eyes and there was this elderly lady. She said, I was just
about to call the ambulance. I said, why? And she said, well, youve been here for
two days.
It was a remarkable house. I dont remember anymore where it was. Because on the
third floor there was an attic, and in the attic (I dont know what I was doing up there)
there was a big barrel filled with teeth. It was filled with teeth! I guess some dental
student was living there.
I have another vivid memory. I lived at 411 North State Street for two years, on the
attic floor. There was a very narrow staircase going up there. I was going home
finally, so I thought . . . well, they had a coiled rope for a fire escape which was
bound to the floor and I thought, instead of my lugging this suitcase down that
narrow staircase I will attach the rope to it and lower it out the window. And I did.
And it dangled about forty feet o the ground. I realized that I would have been dead
had I tried to escape on it. Mr. Dahl owned the house, and as I was lugging my bag
out, I said, you know, that rope ends about a story and a half o the ground, and he
just said, well, somebody must have cut it. Didnt bother him much.
ml: Did you want to come here because of your desire to write and the Hopwood
Awards . . .
am: I knew a guy who had been here for two semesters and then quit to join his
fathers grocery business. I knew him in Brooklyn. And he told me about the Avery
Hopwood Awards. In those days, with the possible exception of Iowa, and Im not
even sure that existed yet, creative writing in colleges was not really accepted as an
academic course. It was too close to life. Harvard had a course in playwriting which
[Eugene] ONeill had attended but they got rid of it because they were embarrassed
by it being not an academica proper academic discipline. And Yale took it. This
place seemed to me because of the Hopwood Awards to be taking writing seriously.
By that time I had been working for some years in New York at various menial jobs. I
had wanted to be a writer in a general, vague way, and I thought, well maybe thats
the place to go. The other thing was that it was so cheap. Columbia, for example,
was five or six hundred dollars a year, which was out of the question. And even NYU

and other New York schools were very expensive. And this was, I cant remember
now, sixty-five dollars or something, a pittance, and that was another reason to come
here. But it was basically the idea that they would be receptive to an idiot trying to
become a writer. And I was glad I did it.
ml: You were saying yesterday that you really didnt know that much about the
theater . . .
am: I knew nothing. I wasnt particularly expecting to become a playwright at that
point. I was trying to write stories, unsuccessfully. When I got here, I hadnt seen any
plays to speak of, maybe two or three plays in my life. However, [Michigan] had an
active department of play production. And I would sit out there and watch some of
the shows, and I got to know a couple of the people that were interested in that kind
of thing.
And there was another reason, I think, that I tried to do playwriting, and that was that
in the thirties, the theater in New York was exploding. For the first time, probably, in
its history, it was beginning to reflect real life, which was the Depression. These small
radical groups of actors were putting on plays in storefronts and garages and places
like that. When you entered, you made a contribution of ten cents or a quarter. And
they were reflecting the new radical outcry against the situation of the country, and
that was exciting. Thats when Orson Welles was starting to perk up, and a number
of very very good actors, mainly actors, and a few writers, like Cliord Odets, were
leading the general feeling that something had to change. The country was slowly
starving, people were being thrown out of their homes, losing their farms and the rest
of it. The standard theater at the time was a very conventional entertainment theater,
which is what it usually is and is now, for the most part, and it hardly reflected
anything but show business. It was of no interest to me, or anybody I knew. So
writing plays seemed to be the best way to confront the audience, to speak what one
was feeling, more so than prose, which seemed to be remote and distant in
comparison.
ml: You said somewhere that you chose theater because it was the cockpit of literary
activity, where you talk directly to an audience and radicalize the people. During the
thirties when you were in Michigan, it was a radical campus, right?
am: Well, part of it was. For example, the Michigan Daily had traditionally been in the
hands of the fraternities, which were generally speaking very conservative. There
were perches like that where the more well-to-do students hung out. But Michigan,
like other schools in the country, was being flooded by sons and daughters of people
who were going bankrupt. They were looking for another voice than that kind of
voice. I was eager to write and the Michigan Daily was open to anybody. I joined the

sta in my sophomore year, I think it was. And we began to really report what was
happening. The Daily was becoming a fairly widespread newspaper rather than a
campus paper, and in fact the Associated Press and the international news services
would send reporters down once or twice a week to pick up what we were doing.
Because there were interesting professors then who would sound o about monetary
policy or one or another of the New Deal measures, and there were authoritative
voices here that we could interview. So it got very exciting for a while, for some
years. And gradually as we managed to wean the paper away from the fraternities it
became a very lively, vital newspaper.

Arthur Miller and Mark Lamos in conversation, 2004

ml: Its interesting, on so many levels, that your early writing was journalism, that you
were interested in current events, the polis as it were. And somehow you never
shook that, as a writer of the fictive; you continued to attempt to speak to society
and societys ills. As did the Greek dramatists and Ibsen, who were your big
influences as a student, certainly, right?
am: Yeah. Ive always felt that the works that last, whether they be plays or fiction,
are of course the works that address the condition of mankind at any one time.
Theyre not simply private emotional works that deal simply with the relationship
between private people. They somehow echo the condition of the whole nation or of
the world. That goes for anybody from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky to Thackeray. If they

last its because theyre reflecting the larger reality of the time. I think its true of
Shakespeare. So really the new note, or the aberration, is the theater and fiction that
has nothing to do with anything. Thats a new invention. The original purpose or
calling of creative art was always the community.
ml: Theres a feeling that, like millions of Americans, the Depression shaped your
view of the world and was continuing to shape your view of what you wanted to
address in the theater even in the sixties and the seventies. The Depression and the
Holocaust seemed to be the two defining issues, if not for all Americans and a good
deal of the world, also for you as an artist.
am: What the Depression was was a crash of accepted values. For probably a half a
century before that, one could say there was a stable set of values in the United
States, as well as in Europe. And when that was overturned and nothing that had
been true was any longer true, you got the feeling that you were living in a very
conditional world which could be swept aside in ten minutes. So that you were
forced to look for deeper values than were on the surface, because the surface
values were going to go at any time. And I think thats what the Depression meant to
me as well as to a lot of other people.
ml: Yesterday you mentioned too that there was a sort of archetypal father figure that
was inextricably tied in to your feelings about the Depression.
am: I guess so. Of course, the fathers are the carriers of the past. The fathers are the
authority, or were. Consequently, the struggle with the father becomes a struggle
with the society. And its reflected in my work a good deal, or in my earlier work
anyway. Now that Im a father I dont do that any more [laughter].
ml: Its interesting that in Resurrection Blues, Arthurs latest play which we just
opened in California, one of the actresses playing a daughter of a man who is a
philosopher, and as such to a certain extent perhaps the playwrights mouthpiece,
though all the characters are, said to me onceI didnt tell you this, Arthur, but she
was going over a line and she wondered if she was saying it correctly and if she had
the right attitude toward the character of her father in the scene. And I said yes, I
think you do. She is a very intelligent actress and she said, I need to be careful
because Arthurs early plays were written by a son, and his later plays are being
written by a father.
am: Thats interesting.
ml: I thought that was very perspicacious. One last thing about your experiences
here, this is as you were leaving the campus for the last time with a guy who sold
saddles who could give you a ride. As he started the engine, I waved to a girl who

was standing in front of the Womens League, a girl that I dared not dream I would
ever have money enough or security of soul enough to marry. As we drove East
through Toledo, Ashtabula, the red brick roads through the Ohio farmlands, I tried to
tell him what Michigan really was. It was the professor who, with selected members
of his class, held sances during which spirits of Erasmus, Luther, and other
historical figures were summoned and listened to. It was the fraternity boys sitting on
porches of their mansions, singing nostalgic Michigan songs as in a movie, and it
was three radicals being expelled. It was in short the testing ground for all my
prejudices, my beliefs, and my ignorance, and it helped lay out the boundaries of my
life. For me it had, above everything else, variety and freedom. It is probably the
same today; if it is not, tragedy is in the making.
You returned to the campus in the fifties, and you were looking at the dierences
from your time two decades earlier. You noted, in this same essay, that there was a
certain fear on the part of the students to say what was on their minds, and that
there were actually FBI people on campus monitoring certain classes, groups, the
Michigan Daily. What were your feelings about that?
am: I should explain that Ted Patrick, who was the editor of Holiday magazine, had
[commissioned] a series of pieces written by graduates of various universities and
colleges who were sent back to their schools to describe any changes that had
occurred in the past twenty years. This was about 1952. He asked me to go back to
Michigan, which I did. I had a professor, Erich Walter, who was the first one to
recognize that I might have some talent. He was now the dean of the university, so I
went to ask his guidance as to what was going on in the school. When I knew him as
a professor, hed come to class with his tie sticking out the side of his collarhe was
very forgetfulhe had his shirt buttoned wrong, and so on. And now he looked like a
chief executive of General Motors. He sat me down and said, Ill never forget this,
well, theres a lot less standing around the lampposts than there used to be,
chatting. I said, What do you mean? He said, Well, the grades are very important
now, and people want to be hired by large corporations, and so theyre watching
their behavior, because the companies are very interested in how they live. Youll find
there is a little less free interchange of ideas and those ideas are not very standard.
But see for yourself. I said, so, where do I look? He said, well, why dont you go
talk to the professor whos in charge of freshman orientation? So I went to see that
guy. We just chatted, and he said, we now have a situation where the FBI is paying
professorsor asking professors, excuse meto report to them any student who
shows any radical ideas in class. And they are also asking students to report on
professors who are saying any radical things in class. So the class was reporting on
the professor and the professor was reporting on the class!

I asked some students, do you feel any repression in discussing ideas of any kind?
And they were all kind of quiet and this girl said, well, I live in a co-op house, but I
dont let anybody know. I asked, why dont you let anybody know? and she said,
well, they think its communism because I live in a house thats a . . . cooperative
house.
I wrote up this piece and reported what I had found. They printed it. And the Pontiac
Motor Company threatened Ted Patrick with withdrawing all their advertising if they
ever used another piece by me. I didnt know that. All I knew was that Ted Patrick
kept calling me up and saying, why dont you write us something? Anything! I said,
Im not a magazine writer. He said, Well, do something! Anything! Its only later
that I discovered why he was pressing me that way. They never did withdraw their
advertising. But that was a little bit of the atmosphere at that time.
ml: Yes, that puts me in mind of Ari Fleischer saying, Be careful what you say.
Certainly theres a feeling now abroad in this country that you had better watch it,
that people are listening, that youre being checked. For a whole series of other
reasons, though, the danger that people felt from the communist threat, such as it
was, or wasnt, was certainly felt as powerfully as what everyone is feeling now about
terror.
am: Its a big problem, but how you handle it is whats important.
ml: A lot of your great roles have had to do with people who deny their society, their
destiny, their fate. And some critics feel that denial actually lies at the very center of
your work, that you explore the lives of those who fail to acknowledge their freedom
to act, like Aeschylus, like Ibsen. And when you think over the people that have come
out of your brain and your response to the world, from the fathers of All My Sons and
Death of a Salesman, to the terrorized Puritans in The Crucible, to the driven Eddie
Carbone in View from the Bridge, on to the extraordinarily perceptively drawn
characters of your later work, comic as well as tragichow immensely enriched our
psychology is, not to mention the lives of audiences whove seen these people, how
much weve learned from witnessing them denying. And I wonder if you could talk
about some of the people that brought those characters to life. Youve worked with
some of the greatest actors in America and England. Just to name a few salesmen:
Lee J. Cobb, Dustin Homan, George C. Scott, Brian Dennehy; recently, in a revival
of The Crucible, Liam Neeson; in a revival of View From the Bridge, Allison Janney as
the wife, Vanessa Redgrave in Playing for Time, John Malkovich, Mildred Dunnock,
Jason Robards in After the Fall, these extraordinary people . . . what did they give
you?
am: Of course, all the people youve mentioned have immense energy, the life force.

Thats probably what we look for in a major actor. They enjoy breathing, they enjoy
even their pain. Its a kind of participation in the joy of life, even when they are
playing a downbeat kind of a person. Its the ones who dont quite achieve that who
arent the stars, that arent the significant actors. We go the theater to stay alive,
finally, to celebrate life. I think that every one of those people you mentioned had that
high intensity. I remember Lee Cobb, who was the original Willy. Ive told this story
before. When I met him he was this big fat lugubrious fellow, and I had imagined the
character to be a little guy full of ginger, one of those little salesmen who are more or
less like a squirrel, and here was Lee looking like a big beef. And he came to my
house once before we cast him because he was desperate to do the part. He was an
old friend of Kazan. My son Bobby was a little boy playing on the floor. At one point
Lee looked down and Bobby had done something funny. And he laughed, Lee did.
And it was a real hearty laugh and you wanted to just burst out crying because it was
so filled with sadness. He could be very funny, but while he was being funny he was
dying in front of you.
I knew that was Willy. Of course, some of these others like George Scott, who was a
raging maniac, and had the energy of a locomotive. And Millie Dunnock, who played
the first Linda, when I laid eyes on her the first time I said, its impossible! Shes as
skinny as a rail, shes far too young, she was probably thirty, thirty-five, and she was
supposed to be the mother of grown guys. And we were reading actress after actress
after actress, and then this actress came in and read and I thought, Ive seen her
somewhere. Well, it was Millie Dunnock, but she had made herself up with a big
dress, and padded herself out, and she got the part.
ml: You worked with Kazan on Salesman and All My Sons and then he also directed a
couple of Tennessee Williamss greatest successes, and then you were on dierent
sides of the fence, politically, during the fifties, and then you came together again.
am: Yes, we did After the Fall.
ml: Ive often wondered what it must have been like in the room
am: Well, I hadnt seen him in a long time. See, Lincoln Center had started under
Robert Whitehead, a friend of mine who had produced some of my plays. Kazan was
the artistic director of the new Lincoln Center; what they were trying to do was to
recreate a good theater. It was maybe the most influential attempt to create an
American theater which was an art theater, rather than a commercial theater. And
Kazan had been part of that, as had Harold Clurman, who was one of the directors of
that theater, and they now were directing the new Lincoln Center which hadnt even
been built yet. So they asked me to contribute a play, and thats how it happened.

ml: Did you choose Kazan or did he . . .

am: Oh, no, he was the director. They needed a first play and they called on me to
provide it. Which I was happy to do, because I thought this theater would maybe
bring back this vision the Group Theatre sometimes had of a theater based on art
rather than box oce. It didnt pan out that way but that was the idea in the first
place. Theres an interesting footnote which I should mention, I suppose, and that
was that before the theater had produced one play, or even announced a play, there
was an astonishing hostility toward it in the press. I couldnt believe it at the time and
I still dont quite understand it, except that there were questions like, if Kazan can
make so much money doing movies and commercial plays, why does he do this?
And when you tried to explain that, well, he wasnt happy doing movies and the rest
of it, you were met with total incomprehension. And [the hostile press] was led by, I
must say, by academics, by people at various universities who were indignant that
these successful people should be running an American theater. It should be run by
failures [laughter], by people who couldnt get their stu done anywhere else. It was
amazing! And that continued until finally it was eectively destroyed.
ml: Every play of yours is autobiographical to a certain extent. After the Fall seems to
have garnered that appellation more than others. And I wonder what it was like when
you were reunited with Kazan and yet there was a character in the play who was
pretty clearly an informer, like Kazan. Did you guys ever talk about that?
am: Well, he had a great capacity for keeping a straight face, Kazan did. And I wrote
the play before I knew that it was going to be at Lincoln Center and I wasnt about to
change it. But he could acclimate himself to anything, as he did with that [laughter].
ml: You said when we were talking before that you hadnt really thought about writing
specifically for actors, per se, and yet you wrote The Misfits for one particular
actress. What was it about her that you felt you wanted to investigate that she
couldnt do in other films?
am: I felt that Marilyn had the possibilities of an important actress. She had a terrific
insight into human behavior. And I thought that under the right circumstances she
could be something else than a comedic performer. And so I wrote that. That was the
only time I ever wrote something for a performer. And I thought she was pretty good
in it.
ml: Id like to talk about your reception in Europe and England, as compared to here.
There seems to be a feeling that a lot of critics, not interestingly enough audiences,
but critics here yearned for what you were doing, though they didnt realize that each
play was a pretty daring experiment. And yet your output in the last twenty years has

been extraordinarily varied and powerful, constantly seeking new forms. One English
writer said, because youre so beloved in England particularly and youre so
scrutinized there, that Millers tragic vision is more compatible with the perspective
of Europeans who accept human imperfection and recognize the need to oset it
with responsible action. And Peter Ackroyd oered the opinion that Miller is quite
out of place in the United States, not because of his erstwhile Marxism or diagnoses
of American ills in his drama, but because he is a man of traditional values in a nation
with no real faith in tradition, a moralist in a society that avoids serious moral debate,
a classical tragedian in a culture that relies upon the more obvious charms of show
business. This is an autobiography (he was writing about Timebends) of a
playwright in the wrong country. His great fear for America, and this is one of Millers
explanations for his greater success in England than in the United States in recent
years, is that we dont have a past anymore. To have no real awareness of a
continuity with the past is to have no culture, to be invisible in ones own land.
What has been the impact on you of the way youre embraced in Europe and in
England particularly?
am: Initially it was very dicult to understand because Ive never spent a great
amount of time in Europe. Id visited, but Id never lived there, really. And Ive never
thought of myself as European in any way. But I think partly, its that . . . lets put it
this way, right now we know that large parts of the world are hostile to the United
States, and everybodys wondering why, apart from this Iraq thing. And I felt for many
years as a result of the impact of my plays that its a mixture of envy and of a fear
that we really have no insight into peoples that are dierent than we are. Americans
dont speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the
borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple
of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand
what other people think about him. We never really cared much about that, excepting
that we like to be praised. But I have felt for many years now that a hostility was
building, apart from the current situation. Because of the tremendous power weve
got to influence other people. The culture of the United States has flooded the world,
and it has gotten to the point where the French, for example, who are symptomatic
(theyre not very unusual) have been tempted from time to time to limit the number of
American films that are shown so that their film industry is not totally engulfed by us,
by American actors and American stories. Its the inevitable result of a powerful
culture, art is. Weve got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind
because weve had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without
knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people,
sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know
how to do it [laughter]. And this has garnered a lot of resentment over the years, at

the same time that it is also imitated. So its a very complicated aair.
I think my own position has been that they sense that Ive had battles of my own with
the culture. For one thing, I dont think that the theater is necessarily only about
entertainment. I think its entertainment that reaches the soul, the spirit. And this has
very little place in our professional theater. Our professional theater is about money,
and its about popularity at any cost, no matter what. And that is a big argument to
be having over a long period of time. And it reflects a little bit their argument with us,
I think.
ml: Popularity at any cost is such an American idea, politically, mediawise, isnt it?
am: No matter what, youve gotta make it big.
ml: I asked one of my students who is working on the Miller celebration that begins
tonight, if she had a couple questions that she might want me to ask you. And she
wrote, After 9/11, many witnesses and television observers of the attack described
it as being like a movie, a fictional construction of special eects. Around-the-clock
news channels and global internet have further blurred the line between how we
experience real eects and how we experience fictional ones. What role can live,
fictional theater play in this world, and what must American theater do to stay vital
today?
Shes getting her Ph.D., OK? Shes supposed to think like that [laughter].
am: Shes really broached an important subject. Were in the hands of actors, largely.
I wrote a short book called Politics and the Art of Acting, which advances the idea
that our politics now is more about acting than it is about values, issues, or anything
else. Its burst loose, its been that way for quite a time, but with television its
overwhelming. It burst loose with Reagan, who knew how to maneuver in front of a
camera better than anyone around him. The real, whatevers real, gets drowned in
eectsspecial eects, the eects of the personality. I often think, what would
Lincoln have looked like on television. You know, he was very ugly. His wrists stuck
out from under his sleeves and he had a mole, he looked terrible. And if you had put
a camera in front of him, he wouldnt have been elected dog-catcher. The first shock
I ever got about this was when I saw some film of Eisenhower being made up. And I
thought, this guy led the biggest military invasion in the history of the world to save
Europe, or help save Europe, and here he is in a chair getting powdered before he
addresses his fellow citizens. There seemed something terribly wrong in that. Of
course, Nixon had a dark beard, a five oclock shadow. He never could shave
properly, he was always dark and looked gruesome. And that probably helped sink
him. And what are we going to do now, are we going to vote on the basis of how

pleasant somebody appears to be or how winning his personality is? What happens
to what he intends to do with the country?
ml: It turns into spin.
am: Its all spin! And I think its maybe the issue. Because, how do you get around
that? In my little book, I point out that in the last election Gore made one error that
might have proved fatal for him, although in my opinion he probably won the
election, but it was pretty close [clapping]. At one point, when Bush said something
utterly idiotic, Gore went like this and the camera caught it [rolls eyes]. And that sunk
him. Every commentator said, What a bad performance. It was the one moment
that he was real. That was the instant when the man really expressed his feelings,
and thats when they nailed him. He wasnt acting, and if you cant act, you cant be
President. Something wrong with that.
ml: I was struck by the fact that you recently accepted the Jerusalem Prize in Israel. I
looked it up on the web and I wanted to read back to you (kind of annoying, I know)
an early paragraph in this very powerful speech.
The fundamentals of my views are simply that Israel has a right to exist, and the
Palestinians likewise, in a state of their own. With the expansion of settlements, I
have witnessed, initially with surprise and then with incredulity, what seemed a selfdefeating policy. Im not going to pursue conflicting arguments with second-hand
knowledge but merely to say the obvious, that the settlement policy appears to have
changed the very nature of the Israeli state, and that a new birth of a humanistic
vision is necessary if the Jewish presence is to be seen as worth preserving. To put it
perhaps too succinctly, without justice at its center, no state can endure as a
representation of the Jewish nature.
am: But the mayor of Jerusalem exploded. I felt for a long time that it was a selfdefeating policy. Again, it was a question of denial. They are denying the existence of
the Palestinians. Golda Meir said, we are the Palestinians, way back. And of course
Israel was settled by socialists, they were the ones who built the country. And they
knew very well that there was a Palestinian identity, and that they existed, and that
the issue had to be dealt with. It later became something that had to be denied. The
fanatics on both sides have now led both peoples into the pit, where theyre tearing
each other to pieces. I dont know what the answer is. I read in the paper today that
some kind of a peace movement seems to be in the bud on both sides, and I only
pray that it gets somewhere, but I dont know enough to say that it will.
ml: You said a couple weeks ago, when we were in San Diego, that all you had to do
was look around the world to see that every single conflict and every death was

caused by religious belief.

am: Well, its a fanatical religious belief, yes. From Northern Ireland to Iraq to the
Middle East, the Palestinians and Israelis, its religious fanaticism which is leading
every one of these disastrous conflicts. Because the idea is, I have the truth, and if I
have the truth, you cant have it, since you dont believe as I do. Its as simple as
that. And once that Manichean idea is let loose, I mean when Bush speaks of the
axis of evil and that we are in a crusade of some sort, it means that we know whats
right and they dont. Well, its a nice fairy tale, but what about them, when they say
they know whats right and we dont? Its war. Were going tear each other to pieces.
Theres no other way. So this kind of fanaticism, ultimately, in the hands of the wrong
people, will blow us all up. For righteousnesss sake. And its probably why, initially,
we were told that there was a wall of separation between church and state in this
country, which a lot of people are trying to tear down, unfortunately.
ml: Another question that the student whos working as a director on this project
wanted me to ask you is this: Youve referred to yourself as a whistleblower of sorts.
Do you hope for these reflections and alarms to catalyze your audiences into active
change, or is raising their consciousness enough?
am: There are very few instances where a work of literature or art or drama or
anything has actually changed the behavior of people directly. Maybe Uncle Toms
Cabin couldve come close to that; Steinbecks story of the Joad family did in fact
cause the passage of certain legislation in Congress, but its a very rare, unusual
thing. All you can hope for, I think, and what you try to do, is illuminate something, so
that people can make up their own minds based on the reality of the situation rather
than the mythology. And if one can do that, its enough.
ml: I was on a panel in New York a few years ago with, among other people, a
scholar of Greek tragedies, who said that the most performances in the history of the
world of Euripides The Trojan Women, ostensibly the greatest antiwar play ever
written, were between 1939 and 1945. But nothing changed. It was only a response
to the horror that was going on.
One more question about the socially relevant writerdo you see any today who are
writing?
am: Im not really equipped to answer that question because I dont read all the
books. I dont have the time, or eyesight. But I have a sense that our literature is
more and more filled with socially relevant work than it was years back. I think were
on a good track, in that respect. The escapist notion is always therepeople want to
get out of their troubles and read some story that takes them away from life. And

thats OK. But theres been a lot of literature in the last years that I think is relevant.
ml: Are there any plays or playwrights that youve read or seen in the last ten years or
so that you feel are going to have an impact on the way we think?
am: The theater has been very involved in life, but its a glancing blow. Were not
taking up issues so much as just dealing with personal feeling. At least thats my
impression. But I see maybe four plays a year, so I cant make any generalizations
about it.
ml: Some questions from you folks [audience]?
q: Good morning, thank you for coming. Was there ever a time that you were stuck
on a play or a character, and if so, what kept you writing, how did you get over it?
am: Sometimes I never got over it [laughter]. And it happens about once a week.
What you read on the page looks like its been there forever, but believe me it hasnt.
Its always a struggle to find what you are looking for. And certainly the theater, the
play, is as much rewritten as it is written. Its a long, arduous, mostly thankless task.
q: Is most of your rewriting done before you bring it into the theater?
am: Yeah. I tend to write maybe the opening twenty-five pages of something, and
then forget it for a couple years. Ive always assumed that I was going to be around
long enough to finish it and then come back and go on with it.
q: I was wondering if you might talk a bit about Resurrection Blues and any parallels
it has to current issues in the media today.
ml: [turning to Miller]: Maybe youd better talk about that.
am: It does, yes, its very related to whats happening now. Basically, the play is a
satire on the brainlessness of so much of our communication, with one another, and
between business and the public, and government and the public, and so on. Its a
play about miscommunication as much as anything else, and miscommunication by
design. What would you say about it?
ml: I think youre absolutely right. Its a play that works on a lot of levels thematically,
thats one of the things that makes it so vital. Craig Nolan, the eighty-eight-year-old
artistic director emeritus of the Old Globe Theatre, said that when he read the play,
its like the play of a twenty-five-year-old writer, passionate and exploratory and
experimental. It does have initially as its targets the media and mediaspeak, but then
it also, subtly and powerfully, goes into the constant dierence between the
description of a thing and the actuality of a thing. Theres a scene that ends the

compilation of Arthurs work that were doing at the Trueblood, in which one
character talks about the fact that on the Egyptian wall paintings, there are
depictions of the various peoples that the Egyptians overcame but, in fact,
anthropologically, no mention of the Jews. And so the whole story in the Old
Testament might in fact be apocryphal. And so you have part of the play dealing with
that disconnect, and you have part of the play dealing with the disconnect between
the reality that these people are televising and the way they want it to look
commercially. In that sense its a really brilliant dissection of how we believe things,
and how we have a collective idea about a deity, because the play is about a
crucifixion, and how we have collective ideas about our past. So its absolutely a
cumulative play in Arthurs thematic oeuvre.
q: As a fellow alumnus of the Michigan Daily, I cant help asking about your
experiences there, if you could elaborate a bit. Were there big stories that you
covered, were there friendships you made that helped your development as a writer
and as a playwright?
am: Well, one story I covered was that of a professor who had finally established that
the reason people got fat was that they ate too much [laughter]. This stu he found
important, and it is. Because what he did was he constructed a room, I dont
remember where on campus, maybe in the medical school somewhere, he
constructed a room inside another room, and in there they recruited students now
and then to go about their daily life inside that room. All the air going in was
measured, and all the carbon dioxide going out was measured, and the food was
measured to the gram, and so on. And he worked for three days with a student, and
discovered that if the intake was lowered by so much, the weight was lowered. And it
was very precise. And it was a disaster for that poor man when I wrote that piece.
Because all of the fat people in the United States thought that he had found the way
to make them thin, and there was a line around the block of people trying to get him
to treat them. And of course he had no interest in that at all, he was just doing the
experiment.
That was one story. Another story was when I interviewed an economist who
explained to me why the Tennessee Valley Authoritythat was the great New Deal
attempt to electrify the farms in the United Stateswhy that whole idea was
unconstitutional. And while he was telling me this the Supreme Court was deciding
that minute that it was constitutional. So as I was writing my piece, and it was being
printed, we were getting on the wire the opposite story! Stu like that.
q: Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Miller. You spoke today, and yesterday a little
bit, about the relationship between theater and our social world and political world. I
was wondering if you could expand today on what you feel is the place of theater

politically and socially, in general and specifically about the integration of religious
and racial ethnicities and bodies in theater.
am: Well, of course, we would be here until next week if I really answered that
question. But I think in the long view, which Im burdened with, things have gotten
better. That doesnt mean theyre great, but its gotten better. You have to remember
that when World War II started, the United States Army was not integrated. There
were no black people mixed with white people in the United States Army. The black
guys were all driving trucks or they were loading trucks, and it reflected the way life
was in this country. I wont go into all the details, you know them better than I. I think
its improved vastly, to think that there would be a black secretary of state would
have been laughable forty years ago. But theres a long way to go, because we have
come a long way with the wrong feelings. And to live down those feelings and to
integrate them into our hearts and change them is not the work of a day or of a
generation, but of many generations. But the only good thing I can say about it is
that, as crazy as this country is, and it certainly is, its got a chance, because of the
craziness, because were not definitely locked in by law to one course of action,
were capable of learning under this system and thats a great hope.
q: Mr. Miller, Could you talk about the creative process and how that works for you
and about finding art and the feelings and emotions you go through and the idea of a
muse, how that works for you?
am: I wish I could answer that question. I dont know what the process is. I generally
work because I am struck by something that someone has said. Playwriting is an oral
art; its not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.
And so I think that if I hear a character speaking, either one Ive invented or one Ive
confronted, it starts a process of creating which I cant control or even describe
properly. If I could describe it I probably wouldnt do it.
q: In todays economic and social world is it possible to have a nonprofit, authentic
art theater, the way the Group Theatre was, for instance?
am: That question is the question. Whether we can hope to ever have a theater
based upon the art that is at the same time reasonably popular, so that it has a
sizable audience. I dont know the answer to that question. I think theater now is
struggling with the television. People go into the theater now hoping to get out of it
and go into movies, because thats where you make a killing and thats where you
can become famous. And the idea of developing actors and writers who want to be
actors and writers for the theater has diminished a great deal. Not just here, its in
Europe and in England, but weve gotten there first, as we do with most things. And
its a question, really, whether we can continue to create new plays and new

productions and new actors and so on, with next to no public support.
Every theater we look back on with any respect was subsidized theater, starting with
the Greeks and Shakespeare and Ibsen, and the rest of them. The idea of private
theater for profit is a very recent idea, and its possibly coming to some kind of an
end. Im speaking of plays, not musicals and big entertainment productions, but
plays where people stand up on stage and talk to each other. A decision will have to
be made by the society that they want this to happen, that they feel there is a value
here that transcends profit and loss. We are nowhere near to even considering such
a decision. The British have made a decision but its very chancy there, its very
unbalanced, its very uncertain too. The British National Theatre gets millions of
pounds a year in subsidy, but they create some very great work. The question is
whether there is a value in that work which compensates for all that money being
spent, when other things need money too. And theres a constant debate going on;
its by no means clear that theyll survive.
We never even had that debate, we never confronted this issue in any serious way. I
cant foresee that we will. I dont see anybody talking about this at all. The theater
with us has basically been a profit-making theater, or not. There may be local
companies which do a little work now and then, but a continuous high-level
institution of some sort that deals on a serious basis with drama and high-level
comedy, we dont have it. And were not about to have it. People constantly bring it
up. But the idea has no power to spread at the moment. There is no consciousness
of such an issue.
ml: One last question. Were so overwhelmed now by global conflict, by religious and
cultural conflict. What can the average citizen do not to feel powerless, and what can
the artist do?
am: It depends on the moment, of course. I happen to believe that we are now on a
very bad course, nationally and internationally. This is the argument of the coming
election. The reason I think it bad is that we seem to be wanting to reestablish an
America that passed away around the turn of the last century, with McKinley. In fact
somebody in the present administration stated openly that their aim was to
reestablish the America of McKinley, which means an America with no restrictions on
any business whatsoever. That is, if youre going to pollute, you pollute. Do whatever
you like, because the market rules. Even Theodore Roosevelts position is not good
enough. He established the national parks, tried to limit the decapitation of the
forests, all that. They dont want that, even. Well, thats one direction. You go there if
you want to go there, and you know how you end up. The question is how much
regulation and to what end. And if we dont do this, if we allow people to simply
pursue profit regardless of what it does to a society, I think we could easily end up as

the biggest third world country on the earth. The capacity to devastate our
environment is now up for grabs, we dont know whether we can survive, and part of
the administration is going in that direction. If it isnt stopped, if it isnt changed, I
think we could end up in an ecological disaster.
You know, about two months ago, a piece of the Arctic icecap broke o, about the
size of the state of Rhode Island, and fell into the sea. This is fresh water, its now
dissolving into the sea. There are scientists, who are serious people, who believe that
this is going to continue, and big pieces of that icecap are going to continue to break
o and dissolve, which will change the warm currents of the Atlantic Ocean and its
direction, and will leave northern Europe and England in an Ice Age. What itll do to
the American climate, God knows. Now, I dont hear anybody talking about that. Its
not a subject thats of interest. Now these people are not crazy. I dont know if its
going to happen or not happen. Theyre talking about it now as one of the greatest
ecological catastrophes in the last ten thousand years. And were sitting here talking
about the theater! Somehow the political leadership has to be our eyes and our
senses, our consciousness, and its not there. I dont sense that anybody can see
further than the next vote. Its not good enough anymore. It really isnt.
ml: I think there is a reason that, at eighty-eight, youre still concerned about . . .
am: Im trying to live to be eighty-nine! [Laughter]
ml: Thank you, Arthur, for still being here.