A Memory of Two Mondays

Abstract

Professor Stephen Marino brings his customary authority to his introduction to the updated Methuen Drama Student Edition of Arthur Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays. This edition is especially welcome because Penguin USA does not publish a single text of Two Mondays, and the centennial Arthur Miller: Collected Plays (2015) inexplicitly omits the play. Under the general editorship of Professor Susan Abbotson, the new Methuen editions contextualize the plays historically and culturally, argue their current relevance, and analyze the plays’ genres and themes. The new editions discuss the plays’ staging histories and scholarly debates, but they increase emphasis on the plays in performance. A section on “Behind the Scenes,” featuring remarks by theater practitioners, is very helpful.Marino remarks ruefully that Two Mondays is a relatively unknown and unproduced play, which in turn has limited commentary on it. Its cultural and social contexts are nonetheless complex and interesting. The early 1950s were turbulent times for Miller. Recent plays, written as responses to political paranoia, had not done well. The federal government was suppressing dissent and encouraging citizens to betray one another. Elia Kazan, Miller’s close friend and collaborator, named names and disavowed his radical past, and Miller’s marriage to Mary Slattery ended amid news of his affair with Marilyn Monroe. Miller welcomed director Martin Ritt’s request for a pair of one-act plays, to be presented Sunday evenings by talented actors, with no concern for commercial value. In a few weeks, Miller developed A Memory of Two Mondays and A View From the Bridge from manuscripts he had at hand: a piece of memoir about his time after high school working in an auto parts warehouse and a draft of his “Italian Tragedy.” As luck would have it, the Sunday evening theater became unavailable, and the pair of one-acts went to Broadway, where they were not well liked. Compounding the irony, the revised, two-act version of View emerged as one of Miller’s great plays. The one-act memory play about a boy’s stint in a warehouse in the early 1930s became a minor play by a major playwright.The Chadick-Delamater warehouse was Miller’s entry into the big world beyond home and school (Miller, Timebends 213). Marino argues how Two Mondays depicts a crucial time in Miller’s young life and a decisive time for most adolescents. The warehouse job taught Miller prejudice and estrangement; he was a Jew in an Irish workplace and a transient because he could get out. The experience helped him realize how harassed and conflicted individuals could come together in moments of crisis to help one another. The times were desperate, but camaraderie somehow made people hopeful, a feeling missing in the 1950s. Miller, as a forty-year-old playwright writing personally about the 1930s, hoped an audience in 1955 would note the irony. Marino coaxes today’s students to see the connection. Harsh economic and social conditions of the Great Depression returned during the Great Recession of the 2000s, compounded by Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.Miller insisted in 1957 that A Memory of Two Mondays shared with A View From the Bridge “the impulse to present rather than represent an interpretation of reality.” Two Mondays has a story but not a plot because work life in the warehouse strips people of alternatives and thus of choices. Marino quotes Miller’s purpose to sum up his discussion of the play’s genres and themes. Miller meant “to relive a sort of reality where necessity was open and bare” and to define for himself “the value of hope” and the heroism of those who know “how to endure its absence” (Miller, Collected Essays 61–62; Marino xvii). These are conditions and attitudes that Bert, as Miller’s surrogate, comes to understand after leaving the warehouse. Marino demonstrates how the recollections account for the mixed modes—realism, romanticism, expressionism—Miller deploys in presenting Bert’s experience.Marino’s understanding of the distinction between presentation and representation drives his analysis of the play. Two Mondays is a memory play, which Marino cogently defines as a technique. A narrator, often representing the author, recalls events in the past that have particular effects on the present. The narrator may be a character in the events, as Bert is, and may also address the audience directly, as Bert does twice. For most of the play, Bert goes about his work fetching parts for shipping; he participates in conversations and actions, such as the comic-suspenseful attempt to resuscitate drunken Tom Kelly, and he listens. He reflects on his experience during the surrealistic transition between the two Mondays, and again between the second Monday and noon the next day, the time of his departure. Bert’s first address to the audience comments on the horror of the place: he and his coworkers, like everyone in the city, are stuck “riding back and forth across a great big room, / From wall to wall and back again, / And no end ever! Just no end!” (36). Bert’s second reflection picks up on cranky old Gus’s accusation that Bert “don’t know nothing” (52). Bert turns to the audience to admit how little he knows, compared to his older coworkers, and how heroic their showing up for work is. Bert complicates his own sentimentality as he admits that these people have etched themselves in his memory forever but will likely forget his name within a month or two, as routine and necessity determine.The surrealism and metatheatricality—cleaning filthy windows to let in light and change the seasons, and self-consciously addressing the audience—define how the play ranges well beyond realism. The staging and narrative techniques enforce Marino’s assertion that memory plays challenge audiences to consider the narrator as a character in the action and simultaneously to understand the author’s impulse for creating an autobiographical figure whose self-reflection becomes a problematical aspect of the play. Audiences experience two memories, Bert’s and Miller’s; but we also experience the play’s moments directly in the present. Like Bert, we hear recurring utterances, witness vivid set pieces, and infer offstage passions and frustrations. Marino describes this style well. The play gives us glimpses of the characters’ desires and frustrations by dramatizing an action that typifies each character and frustration (xiii).We experience a disturbing but reassuringly accurate evocation of work. Marino raises but does not belabor themes such as hope, endurance, economic success, and the will to escape. Rather, his discussion arrives at these summations via analyses of genre, dramatic form and style, and direct presentation. The approach suits well the surprising density of Two Mondays, and it instructs students and teachers in how to read dramatic literature. Marino discusses in some detail a few notable productions, such as one staged by prisoners in the United Kingdom, and summarizes several significant critical commentaries on the play. In conjunction with Marino’s introduction, the recommended scholarly materials enable students to establish positions from which to argue their own interpretations.The interview with Professor Rob Roznowski, in the “Behind the Scene” section, is a strength in this new edition. Roznowski directed a production of Two Mondays at Michigan State University in 2018, in a double-bill with the one-act version of A View From the Bridge. The season was dedicated to “Breaking Down Borders,” which speaks to the plays’ abiding relevance. Roznowski talks about the appeal of directing a complicated, underproduced play; the challenge of staging the seasonal transition scene; the difficulty of focusing the action when so many characters are entering and exiting the stage all the time; and the instructiveness of young actors portraying much older characters and understanding 1930s history. I found particularly interesting his remarks on how his actors discovered the play’s incidental, incremental process: the beauty of visiting these characters on separate Mondays, for example, and the way we glean bits of information. We get a little of Agnes in one moment and then a little more the next time she comes on; we get hints about the start and end of Larry and Patricia’s affair, which somehow relates to his fondness for the way valves are laid out in an Auburn automobile. Roznowski makes a strong case for Two Mondays as a teaching text; I can see using it in a course on labor, coming of age, or reading drama.I recently read Two Mondays in light shed by Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, which helped me hear the anger and resilience of Miller’s characters more than their melancholy. Marino’s commentary got me thinking about my years, at Bert’s age, working on road construction and saving for college. I felt not a nostalgia for the good old days (the 1960s in my case) but rather a rebuke for not grasping the complexity of the lives of coworkers. This is the rebuke Bert feels when Gus, overwhelmed with his own guilt and remorse for his wife Lilly’s death, addresses his great “I was here” speech not to management but to Bert. (Or maybe Bert just remembers it as being addressed to him.) Gus measures his years of toil and neglect in terms of defunct automobiles, an expression of his alienated labor, I suppose. “I know,” Bert says, to which Gus replies, “You don’t know nothing” (52). The men I worked with (they were all men on construction in those days) came of age during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War. This one older guy, a foreman but educated, I think, would say to me, “Dick, if I had my life to live over, I’d live over a bar.” It took me a while to realize why his Mondays seemed so rough.