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Editor’s Note Editor’s音符

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.1.0076

Susan C. W. Abbotson

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After the Fall 堕落之后

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0180

Stefani Koorey

{"title":"After the Fall","authors":"Stefani Koorey","doi":"10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0180","url":null,"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 ","PeriodicalId":40151,"journal":{"name":"Arthur Miller Journal","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135446482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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All My Sons 我所有的儿子

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0217

Huw Griffiths

{"title":"All My Sons","authors":"Huw Griffiths","doi":"10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0217","url":null,"abstract":"Toward the end of act 1 of All My Sons, Joe Keller explains what it was like to have been exonerated for the crime of knowingly supplying faulty aircraft cylinder heads during the war. He describes walking through the neighborhood, the apparent proof of his innocence in his pocket in the form of release papers. Neighbors who had been certain of his guilt were, he claims, obliged to admit his innocence through a combination of the trial verdict and his self-confidence. As he tells this story, Joe reveals a detail that is of no consequence to the plot but that establishes important aspects of the context: that the planes that crashed through his negligence came down in Australia: “I was the beast; the guy who sold cracked cylinder heads to the Army Air Force; the guy who made twenty-one P-40s crash in Australia. Kid, walkin’ down that street that day I was guilty as hell. Except I wasn’t and there was a court paper in my pocket to prove I wasn’t” (80).How would that detail have been received in the first performances of All My Sons in 1947? Most likely, it would have been understood as one more fact that materially connects the play’s suburban backyard setting to the global conflict that has recently transformed the lives of the Kellers and their neighbors. “Australia” is, potentially, an alien and jarring word in Miller’s midwestern suburbia, albeit one that provides crucial background to the story. Australia was the location for multiple U.S. Army Air Force airbases during the war and a key launchpad for the campaign in the Pacific. It is, then, a word that provides realistic and immediate detail for the original postwar audiences; an understanding of Australia as a close military ally of the United States in the Pacific was forged during these campaigns. But it is also a word that says something, to Americans, about distance. It broadens the horizons against which the action of the play takes place, the neighborly fences giving way to a vertiginously endless sky. If All My Sons is famously an Ibsenesque play, whose narrative is structured around the inescapable consequences of past actions, it is also a play that sets the resolutely local against the global, and at this moment in the dialogue, “Australia” is Miller’s sign for that collapse of distance between the suburban backyard and scenes of international conflict.The word might, of course, land a little differently in Australia in 2023. It is not that New Theatre’s production in Sydney made deliberate play of the distance—both temporal and geographical—of 1940s America from our own contemporary moment. It is rather that Miller’s most realist play can’t but help, at this remove, to look like a period piece. “Australia” still jars, but it does so a little differently, making us aware of where we are now, at this moment, in relation to the end of the Second World War. In conversation with Saro Lusty-Cavallari, the young director of this excellent production, he talked about the need not to see ","PeriodicalId":40151,"journal":{"name":"Arthur Miller Journal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135446718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Arthur Miller and Shakespearean Forgery 阿瑟·米勒与莎士比亚的伪作

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.1.0014

S. Marks

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The Crucible 的坩埚

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.1.0102

Jax Donnellan

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Editor’s Note: Methuen Drama Student Editions 编者注:Methuen戏剧学生版

Arthur Miller Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.5325/arthmillj.18.2.0170

Stefani Koorey