Broken Glass

Each edition of the Methuen Drama Student Edition of Arthur Miller’s works is organized in a similar fashion. It is a clear and concise way of arranging the critical commentary, especially because each volume is examined by a different scholar. In this volume on Broken Glass, we have a duo of Indian women: Ambika Singh, an independent scholar who writes about American theater, feminism, and race studies, and Nupur Tandon, a professor in the department of humanities and social science at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology. Her specialty includes gender and identity in global and postcolonial literature.Broken Glass takes place in New York in 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, when, for the first time, Jewish people “were physically attacked with the explicit endorsement of the Nazi government as their homes and shops were brutally vandalized and destroyed” (Espejo-Romero, ed., Arthur Miller After the Fall, x). For this reason, the historical, social, and cultural contexts section of the introduction centers around Miller’s Jewish upbringing, his identity as a Jewish writer, his travels to Europe after the war, his visit to the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1962 with wife Inge Morath, and his own experiences with anti-Semitism in America. It is fitting that the reader understand where Miller’s dramaturgy originates, but little space is given for his adult-era embrace of atheism and his own disavowal of religion in general that certainly had a profound effect on this 1994 play. It is as if the editors here decided that since Miller was born Jewish, he naturally wrote plays with Jewish themes and characters, when the reality of the construction of Miller’s thematic scope is far more complex than this would lead the reader to understand.In their examination of the play’s genre and themes, the editors mistakenly call Phillip Gellburg “the play’s tragic hero” (xii). It seems, so soon after quoting from Miller’s 1949 essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” that they are putting forth a literal reading of Broken Glass as one in which the man is the protagonist. Many critics have discussed that in Broken Glass Miller has constructed his first full-length play with a female protagonist: Sylvia Gellburg. Hers is the character who goes through the necessary change to be identified as the protagonist. In fact, her husband Philip may be the antagonist of the play, as he precipitates her change with his refusal to embrace his ethnicity and constant fear of being fired for being Jewish. Sylvia’s hysterical paralysis, her internal dilemma, does not reveal itself through any active struggle with a changing social order, as is evident in plays by Miller with a male protagonist, but instead her conflict manifests as a co-opted physical ailment. By foregrounding paralysis as an overt metaphor for inaction, or rather inability to act, Miller makes Sylvia conspicuously displaced from herself, half-dead, stymied, and alone. Miller does not allow her to realize the source of her hysteria until her male doctor helps her to its source: her passionless sexuality. This, the play presents, she could never have discovered alone.Sylvia Gellburg is the main character because the story of Broken Glass is hers. We are with her as she develops a passionate attachment to her doctor, a married man who seems to have a past filled with adulterous encounters with female patients. Sylvia’s attraction to her doctor provides her only and eventual cure. At the play’s climax, she stands up from her wheelchair and takes a few tentative steps as her husband lies (perhaps) dying on the bed. Her strength appears renewed by the public exposure of the source of her hysteria. As a fait accompli, Miller has Sylvia emerge from her trauma inspired and ready to assume her new roles of caretaker and mother to her husband through his illness and/or death.Without a clear reading of the importance of Sylvia in the context of Miller’s oeuvre and an understanding of the uniqueness of this play in that regard, the editors do not impress upon the reader a modern sense of this drama or its pivotal significance in the canon. They play into the drama’s own misogyny with their assumption that the man must be the tragic hero, when he clearly is not.The play as performance section is interesting in the telling of Miller’s continuous revisions of the text during rehearsals and after its first previews. The evolution of the title of the work (from Man in Black to Gellburg, then to Broken Glass) is likewise well delivered. However, this portion of the introduction to the play could use focus on issues of the work’s production problems, design choices, and acting challenges, when compared to other volumes in this series by Methuen. It reads as an overgeneralization of Holocaust themes instead of examining the work for issues that might face a production company when electing to present the play to the public.In its production history, much is made of the premiere and the recasting that was done (Dianne Wiest replaced by Amy Irving, Ron Silver replaced by David Dukes) as revisions were effected during the preview process. But one wishes to know why these changes were made as they might offer insight into the complexities of mounting any new play. The remainder, however, is quite good and gives the student reader an excellent overview of various ways in which the play has been presented, both on the stage and on television.Likewise, the academic debate portion of the introduction is clearly stated and shows us the potential for further study of this, Miller’s “unsung masterpiece” (xxiii). Omitted, however, are those scholars who are taking a feminist view of the play and finding it wanting. There is also an awkward portion where the editors quote themselves without self-referential pronouns, which seems gratuitous. After stating Broken Glass “is not as well-known as his later plays” and has “so far failed to garner the interest and acknowledgment it deserves,” they continue that the work’s academic debate “is not very complex or controversial.” However, this is belied by the rest of their review of critical opinion writing. There are a dozen scholars mentioned, sometimes briefly, but each is expressing a differing view of the work and its place in Miller’s canon.The use of director David Thacker’s insight into the “Behind the Scenes” area of the introduction is a solid one, and he is indeed a fountain of information as he directed not only the National Theatre production but the television adaptation, produced by the BBC in association with WGBH Boston in 1996, starring Margot Leicester, Henry Goldman, Mandy Patinkin, and Elizabeth McGovern. It is the most interesting and informative aspect of the entire introduction and left me wanting more. Thacker’s suggestions to Miller’s text helped the stage production become the success that it did, earning the play an Olivier Award in 1995 and a BBC Award for the Play of the Year.Overall, this is an interesting, if flawed, introduction to Broken Glass that will probably serve its audience of student readers well.