The American Clock

Abstract

Professor Jane Dominik covers very well the sweep, scope, and hybrid form of Arthur Miller’s The American Clock in her introduction to the updated Methuen Drama Student Edition of the play. Introductions to the new series, under the general editorship of Professor Susan Abbotson, contextualize the plays historically and culturally, discuss their genres and themes, and review their stage histories and critical and scholarly receptions. Aptly, the introductions pay attention to the plays in performance and include a “Behind the Scenes” section featuring interviews with theater practitioners. Consequently, these introductions are particularly useful to students in both theater and literature courses and to teachers and scholars who stress that we should read plays with performance in mind.As Dominik notes, The American Clock is one of Miller’s most experimental plays, and perhaps his most ambitious. Drawing upon the Miller family’s experience in the late 1920s and 1930s (fictionalized as the Baums), his own recollections of the Great Depression’s effects on people, and oral histories recounted in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, Miller dramatizes one of the two most traumatic events in U.S. history (the Civil War being the other one). Clock is epic in the popular sense of being big and episodic, and epic in the Brechtian sense of estranging audiences, keeping us aware of its theatricalization of events so that we can be critical of what we are witnessing and not overwhelmed by pity or sentimentality. Dominik covers the play’s historical and cultural context in two dense pages, an impressive achievement: the booming 1920s, the stock market crash, the ensuing crush of a failed economy and catastrophic weather, the rise of Nazism in Europe, and the creation of a welfare system in the United States. Dominik manages this with a fitting mix of historical generalizations and specific examples. She does not say much about the play’s relevance to today’s students, but that is easy to infer. Miller wrote Clock in the booming 1970s and staged it in the 1980s, as if anticipating the market crash of 1987. The New Deal is still under attack in the third decade of the twenty-first century, and post-COVID social, economic, and political upheaval, while not so universal as in the 1933, is worrisome in 2023.Dominik argues that Miller had always experimented with dramatic form, trying to capture on stage the fluidity of consciousness as well as the dynamic interplay of history and politics. Clock integrates the social and familial with the personal and political; and so economic and sociopolitical themes alternate with individual responsibility and family, even when choices are limited or nonexistent (xii). The aim, Miller wrote in his introduction to the play, was “to give some sense of life as we lived it” in the 1930s, and to balance epic elements with “the intimate psychological lives of individuals and families like the Baums” (Collected Essays 301–3). As Dominik wittily puts it, Miller wrote “a kind of upbeat tragedy, filled with hope and humour, music and song” (xi). She describes genre features and summarizes themes succinctly, reflecting the play’s historical impetus and its presentation of cultural myth, gender, class, and race. Women take over men’s roles as providers; rich and poor, bankers and farmers, lose their identities but often find their common humanity (xii). Dominik lets the themes reveal themselves, arising out of her discussion of dramatic form and structure, and style and tone. Rose Baum’s high spirits and love of music gradually give way to fear and desperation as the Depression deepens and bill collectors come knocking. Irene, a Black Communist, gives loud voice to solidarity in the relief office scene in act 2, while Moe Baum, who pretends to be estranged from his son Lee, unexpectedly blows up. Moe’s personal humiliation at how he now struggles to make a living detonates his impatience with Lee’s cynicism, dumbfounding Lee and persuading the relief officer that Lee cannot live at home, a prerequisite for getting into the Works Progress Administration’s Writers Program. Seamlessly, documentary mode and psychosocial presentation issue in unexpected comedy.Dominik pays a lot of attention to The American Clock in performance and to its stage history. This is as it should be because Clock is so manifestly theatrical: in its sheer entertainment value and in its Brechtian impulse to remind us that we are watching a play (or is it a musical?), that history is performed, and that we need critical distance if we are to avert future catastrophe. The emphasis on performance is also appropriate because the play itself, as Miller lamented, had trouble finding its form and mood, and thus its audience. The play’s complexity—fluid form; multiple locations, time changes, and story lines; huge cast and doubling of roles—makes terrific demands on directors, and on set, lighting, sound, and costume designers. It also gives them remarkable opportunities for creativity, more than any other Miller play does, and more than most modern plays do (xiv). The “Behind the Scenes” theater practitioners speak to the particulars of successful productions (timing, flow, costumes, lighting, music) and to the urgency with which the play speaks to audiences about the 1930s, 1970s and 1980s, and our time.Dominik reviews Clock’s few major productions, from its troubled Broadway premiere in 1980 through a bold but controversial staging at the Old Vic in London in 2019. The 1980 version was too gray and static to succeed; the 2019 version may have been too innovative. To underscore the play’s universality in 2019, director Rachel Chavkin cast the Baum family in triplicate, as white Jewish, South Asian, and Black American. This concept sounds fascinating to me, but at least one critic found it muddled. The most successful productions seem to date from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. The 1984 Los Angeles production liberated the play’s vaudevillian potential; that release led to even greater success at the National Theatre in London in 1986. Peter Wood’s NT production “embraced the play fully and was very musical,” with a jazz band onstage (xviii). Miller thought the production had an “antic yet thematically precise spirit” that conveyed “the seriousness [his italics] of the disaster that the Great Depression was, and at the same time its human heart” (Collected Essays 307). The 1993 TNT Screenworks TV production (teleplay by Frank Galati) was well received by critics. It does not strike me as “antic,” but it is energetic and sensitive; and it provides a good sense of how domestic and public scenes interweave, supported by music and a cinematic style. We are lucky to have it available in lieu of live productions.Infrequent productions of The American Clock have dampened critical and scholarly discussions. Dominik’s introduction makes a significant contribution to this still developing conversation. The works she discusses under “Academic Debate” and lists under “Further Study” provide students and teachers with ample materials upon which to build interpretations. As Dominik concludes, “Overall, while Clock’s thematic and autobiographical elements have been recognized, its form and quality remain under scrutiny” (xxiii). The scholars Dominik lists—Susan Abbotson, Christopher Bigsby, Terry Otten, and Gerald Weales—are familiar, highly reliable authorities. Dominik also gives a sentence to Peter Ferran’s piece on “The American Clock: Epic Vaudeville” that appears in Enoch Brater’s Arthur Miller’s America. Ferran analyzes the play’s presentational and epic style, and its comedic and musical aspects (xxii). He writes from the perspective of a university theater director and so makes cogent points about students’ discovery processes. Ferran’s essay supplements well the “Behind the Scenes” commentaries, which are very good on set, costume, lighting, and sound designs.Reviewing Jane Dominik’s edition of The American Clock along with Stephen Marino’s edition of A Memory of Two Mondays has been fortuitous. Bert in Two Mondays and Lee in Clock offer different versions of Miller’s coming of age and so give us very different perspectives on finding an identity in hard times. Both plays come down on the side of resilience and a kind of pragmatic solidarity, and so give expression to a necessary hope. I was struck, too, by how much more generously Lee remembers his parents in Clock than Quentin, another Miller avatar, recalls his in After the Fall. These various versions of the Millers complicate and compound one another, and so our sense of family and history. Two Mondays may be a pathetic comedy, but that is no less a lively contradiction than Clock being a festive tragedy. Dominik does not say so explicitly, but she seems to come down on the side of Abbotson, who considers The American Clock to be one of Miller’s most powerful plays. That seems right to me.