The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

It is appropriate that Thiago Russo, a psychoanalyst as well as a doctor in American literature from Sao Paulo University, Brazil, is the one appointed to introduce Arthur Miller’s late play, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1993) for the Methuen Drama series starting in 2022 because the play engages keenly with the domain of the psychological as well as that of the sociopolitical in its examination of forces in operation during Ronald Reagan’s entire tenure as U.S. president in the 1980s. Miller’s critique of the problematic neoliberalism of the Reagan-Bush era polarizes his trauma of encountering the deliberate witch hunt of alleged communist sympathizers during the McCarthy regime of the 1950s.In this regard The Ride, centered around its middle-aged, maverick antihero Lyman Felt, echoes facets of Miller’s canonical play Death of a Salesman (1949), initially titled The Inside of His Head and suggestive of the neuroses and self-destructive plight of those invoking the American Dream on the contemporary stage. Russo’s succinct introduction to this new edition of Ride may be contextualized in his earlier essay, “Reaganism in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan,” published in the critical anthology Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century (2020), which provides numerous recent viewpoints of Miller as a globally acknowledged playwright, noting that Miller’sAs the quintessential modern American playwright, Miller has always had a prescient way with words: at times they bear a contemporary, allegorical significance of nomenclature in his characters—Newman, Loman, Hyman, Lyman; and at other times they are couched in tragicomic irony in a play title like The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, where the word “ride,” normally associated with fun and games or acts of impromptu transportation, euphemistically represents a serious bone-crunching car accident on an ice-bound mountain road—an accident that critically unravels the duplicity of a zealous, self-righteous hero.“Duplicity” is a concept that could be a synonym for “mask,” and the practice of using masks—or multiple, expedient personae—for self-preservation through anonymity or self-aggrandizement on the stage has been prevalent for millennia in Western drama. In Miller’s plays, Joe Keller, Willy Loman, John Proctor, Quentin, Lyman Felt all wear a variety of masks while justifying their motivation of good living or pleasure or “success,” a word that Felt spells wittily as “suckcess”—a risqué, symbolic rendering of the American Dream as a giant female tit that is unending in its lactating resource of happiness.The market forces that pressurized Joe Keller and Willy Loman to nurture the equivocal choices they did in the contexts of the Depression and World War II take on a different color and value system beyond erstwhile urban conflicts to a much more solipsistic and consumerist stage in the Reagan era. Felt may have gone beyond the anxieties of Loman in negotiating his fate above the survival line in society, but attributes of delusion, greed, opportunism, and self-righteousness persist with added energy. Lyman subscribes to a set of pseudo-liberal values that not only condone the unsanctioned notion of bigamy but also insulate his duplicity from his two wives over nine years until the historical moment of the car accident. While aware that ends do not justify the means, his ego baulks at admitting his guilt.Lyman Felt’s illusion of a blissful, bigamous marriage results from his self-justification of lying as an art in order to sustain that tenuous paradise. He fictionalizes his “divorce” with the older, first wife Thea, inducing the second, Leah, to imagine she is starting on a clean slate. Subsequently, the entire edifice that had been built on the foundation of that lie crumbles. Yet he believes he has done no wrong and that both the women could live happily ever after in his Elysium if they could forgive his harmless subterfuges. Of course he, much more than Loman in Salesman, covers his tracks of conscience and concupiscence by seemingly legalizing his unsanctioned unions. Like Joe Keller, Lyman justifies his withholding of truth in the past on the basis of the happiness, both material and emotional, that he has genuinely delivered so far to his two families. The price of his presumption is his complete alienation in the end.Russo observes that the play alternates between memories in a constant movement of fragments as an interpreting of facts subjectively and ensuring its own defense. Yet to a greater degree than Miller’s initial women characters, both Thea and Leah, while loving Felt, possess independent views of their own and finally reject him as impossible to inhabit with. While Russo seems to feel that Ride’s form and content are “difficult to present on the modern American stage” because of its veering from realism, he also admits that Miller had done it before quite successfully in Salesman and After the Fall, with “fragments of the protagonist’s life and marriage” composed in a pattern. Albeit this was endorsed expressionistically, a trait of his “earlier days” that Gerald Weales had apparently shown a preference for. While Russo constantly mentions the “challenges” and problems of Ride’s “complex” dramatic form comprising the mixture of the “real” and the “imaginary,” he also admits that Miller is enabled to “translate” his vision of the “chaotic state of the post-modern contemporary world” into the “heart of the play’s form” (xvii).Ironically enough, Miller’s reputation of being “Un-American,” after being interrogated for his alleged communist links in the fifties, was in tune with his literary objective of critiquing the so-called American Dream of success. But in questioning “established national myths,” Miller initiates new perspectives of the self. Russo observes, “His unmasking of one of the most powerful narratives of the United States is at the core of Miller’s private and public life.” Whether it is Joe Keller or Willy Loman or Lyman Felt, the objective of self-unmasking becomes a predominant tragicomic impulse on the modern American stage. Lyman’s unmasking (or trial) begins with his apparently fortuitous and suicidal car accident. Keeping Ibsen in mind, Russo perceives the hero’s relationship with the past as “a rather powerful weapon in order to look forward to the present and the future” (xi). In following his hedonistic course of solipsism, Lyman is compared with Ibsen’s picaresque hero Peer Gynt.In critiquing Reaganism in his apparently “Un-American” vein, Miller was accompanied by contemporaries David Rabe, David Mamet, and Tony Kushner. In his interview with Charlie Rose in April 2000, he also found “an interesting departure” in Sam Shepard’s plays. Miller’s essay On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001) views politicians like Reagan, Bush, and Al Gore as “actors” using masks to undermine transparency. Lyman’s ambivalence between true and assumed selves often revives the gap between the “notoriously mixed stories” that Reagan had actually lived and those he had acted in or watched in movies in Hollywood. Russo sees Ride as both a “diagnostic” of the Reagan era and a “prognostic” (xiii) of the times ahead. However, regarding form he could have also mentioned that in the alternation between real time and staged memories, Miller qualifies his experiments in expressionism, initiated in Salesman and perhaps continued less lyrically in Ride.On the threshold of Lyman’s “fall,” Miller provides a touch of parody in the rhetoric of an ambitious “Marlovian” overreacher who boasts transgressing human limitations, “dancing the high wire on the edge of the world” (115) but aware that such defiance of nature to be what is “wrong” with him: “I could never stand still for death! . . . And I can’t, I won’t! . . . So I’m left wrestling with this anachronistic energy which . . . God has charged me with and I will use it till the dirt is shoveled into my mouth! Life! Life! Fuck death and dying!” (110). It is a rhetoric less significant of a heroic idiom of survival than the preliminary signs of insanity in a man who is vulnerable, broken, and lying heavily bandaged in a hospital ward.On the subject of “realism” on the stage that cropped up during an interview in April 1993 that I had with Arthur Miller, he clearly had reservations about placing both All My Sons and Death of a Salesman on the same platform, since the latter, he felt, actually constituted “a highly organized poem” (138). The Ride also crosses the boundaries of Ibsenite realism as it deals with the flux of memory in relation to nonlinear time and the guilt of unsanctioned desires. When I surmised that both Salesman and Ride started with a jolt, a car accident—Willie in his Studebaker, Lyman in his Porsche—a jolt that shook the heroes concerned from their complacence to initiate their tragicomic alienation, Miller rejoined with a smile that he “hadn’t thought of that!” and that it was a “very good” and “interesting” idea (139).Russo cites academic debates about the play’s central issues of freedom, betrayal, marriage, and gender. He recalls an interview conducted by David Esbjornson, the director of Ride staged at the Public Theater in New York in 1998 and on Broadway in 2000; but he overlooks the Charlie Rose talk show conducted the latter year with Arthur Miller and lead actor Patrick Stewart who played Lyman Felt in the same productions. Here, Miller clarifies that it has been his sole intention not to “settle” the conflicts of marriage but only to illuminate them on the stage. While acknowledging his debt to the tradition of Greek and Ibsenite drama, Miller speaks of the “past” as bearing upon the present in a way that he is enabled to foreground its significance through a conflict in “a day of reckoning” with all “the chickens coming home to roost.” Every play he has written has presented this fundamental idea.Russo’s introduction to Ride is scholarly, comprehensive, and optimistic; but, perhaps, more facets could have been highlighted about the dramatic complexity of the play’s form and thematic content, besides the perspective of Reaganism, which, of course, is important contextually, just as the Depression is relevant to the appreciation of Death of a Salesman. This revised and definitive version of the play, published three decades after its original staging, demonstrates to students in the present its universal, radical value in both content and form. The production history and the current academic debates provide a unique vista of the potential of modern American drama, the “essence and political culture” of an era, while portraying the conflict between the ideas of honesty with others and honesty with oneself.