After the Fall

Abstract

Each Methuen Drama Student Edition of the plays of Arthur Miller is edited by Miller expert Sue Abbotson, but a different scholar pens the introductions to the dramas included in the series. In this volume, the examination of After the Fall is in the capable hands of Ramón Espejo-Romero, a senior professor in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain, and an expert on the playwright, having edited scholarly editions and translations of three of Miller’s seminal plays into Spanish. He is well suited to this task.Espejo-Romero’s writing style is entirely accessible, and his historical, social, and cultural contexts section shares the milieu around Miller’s writing of this work, a play commissioned by the Lincoln Center to inaugurate its new performing arts organization in New York City. Espejo-Romero briefly, but accurately, explores the autobiographical connections between Miller and his play, including the characters drawn of his three wives and several of his friends: Louise is a thinly veiled representation of first wife Mary Slattery; Maggie is Marilyn Monroe; and Holga is third wife Inge Morath. Miller, of course, is the main character Quentin.Directed by his estranged friend Elia Kazan and premiering just sixteen months after Monroe’s death, After the Fall was destined to be an important work, and one that was heavily criticized, both positively and negatively. In it, Miller’s alter ego Quentin realizes, says Espejo-Romero, that the success of his third marriage depended on “a thorough understanding of why two previous marriages had failed” (x). It is not a simple story of redemption through confession, but rather a complex analysis of Quentin’s culpability in the disintegration of his past relationships.Deemed an “experimental” play, After the Fall is an impressionistic journey through Quentin’s subconscious as he reveals to the audience nonlinear bits and fragments of his imagination, deployed “at will, although they often intrude upon his consciousness to suggest aspects of his psyche that he prefers not to confront or occurrences that he seems to have forgotten or are buried,” creating a “complex, contradictory and tentative” play that “invites us to join in Quentin’s quest for a viable sense of self” (xiii).But the play is more than a personal journey, as Miller “takes on social issues such as the communist witch-hunts of the previous decade and the Holocaust. It also tackles abstract concerns such as guilt, betrayal, personal and social responsibility, and how to reconcile the needs of others with the demands that the self places on oneself, as well the inescapable selfishness of all human beings” (xiv)—an excellent summation of the themes presented in this play.The sections in this introduction pertaining to the play in performance and production history are important ones because it is through the understanding of what After the Fall looked, sounded, and felt like to its audiences, and how the production “evolved” through planning and rehearsals, that brings the reader closer to the play’s realization. As a collaborative art form, theater depends not only on a playwright but equally, one can say, on a competent director who can interpret the work effectively enough so that the rest of the creative staff of designers (lighting, scenic design, costuming) can realize that vision. A play, after all, is but a static work if not performed and cannot be properly assessed without an audience to respond to it. A play is not simply written text but a blueprint for a living and breathing thing that truly becomes alive only on the stage. Otherwise, it is words on a page, interpreted and heard with the voice of the reader, not the actor who seeks to embody the character. Thus, a play is meant to be played and read only for the further study of the intricacies of construction and development. It is not yet living in its printed form.This introduction includes a “Behind the Scenes” report on an interview with director Michael Blakemore, who staged After the Fall for the National Theatre in London in 1990, to some critical success. Miller gave his full approval to the production, including the casting of Black actress Josette Simon as the Maggie/Marilyn character. Critics seemed to agree that there is nothing in the text or character backstory to make such a choice work against the script. This interview was conducted in July 1999 by Miller scholar Jane K. Dominik and explores Blakemore’s conceptualizing of his production from text to stage, a production that developed the “idea of order emerging from chaos” as its principal guiding light (xxv).One wishes there was more space here for a much longer retelling of this interview, as it would greatly enhance the critical introduction for students and scholars alike. As it now stands, we have a three-paragraph overview that leaves us wanting more, not only for clarification’s sake but for the opportunity it holds to get closer to the artistic process that Blakemore went through in developing his important and well-received production.The last section on “Further Study” also is too perfunctory to be entirely useful. Left off this list are the very works of scholarship detailed in the sections before it, like the gendered analyses of June Schleuter in her edited collection of essays, Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama; Iska Alter’s seminal work in that same book; David Savran’s monumental work, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (University of Minnesota, 1992); Steven Centola’s The Achievement of Arthur Miller: New Essays (Contemporary Research, 1995); and, of course, Brenda Murphy’s groundbreaking essay “Arthur Miller: Revisioning Realism” in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition (ed. William W. Demastes; University of Alabama Press, 1996).I am sure that, if not for length requirements, this section and the one preceding it would be more complete and thus satisfying.Any student of modern American drama and Miller’s works would be well served by this excellent introduction to After the Fall.