"A survey by Britain's Royal National Theater of more than 800 playwrights, actors, directors and critics has chosen Arthur Miller as the best playwright of the 20th century."

-The New York Times, October 1998

In his nearly 60-year career as author, playwright, and all-purpose symbol of American dramaturgy, Arthur Miller has garnered prizes (Tonys, an Olivier, and a Pulitzer among them), plaudits and well-nigh universal respect. He has become so established a theatrical icon that to decry his plays (the earlier ones, anyway - it's become fashionable to murmur that he's slipping) is tantamount to sacrilege. Comparable endeavor: Imagine declaiming to a covey of art lovers that Picasso's blue period isn't anything to write home about - see how kindly they respond.

Arthur Miller is regarded as a pioneer of form, a whiz-kid of thematics, and a positive genius of sensitive and honest characterization. What a lot of hooey. Far from being a dashing experimenter or a uniquely American empath, Arthur Miller is a stodgy proponent of the sort of well-made play which bores me near to tears. His dolorous canon (Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons, After the Fall, A View from the Bridge, Broken Glass, etc.) discloses study after study of pedestrian characters (complete with unambiguous diction and unremarkable lives) who are elevated to mytho-poetic heights. This absurd apotheosis is accomplished via the most cloying theatrical device: raw sentimentality and the consequent pity it inspires.

No play embodies these conventions more than Miller's best-known and loved work, the 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman. Salesman details the tribulations of the Loman family, a middle-class New York clan rife with helpless love, dishonesty and sorrow. At its center stands Willy Loman, the salesman of the title, an all-American husband and father who becomes increasingly unbalanced as he realizes how far his life and his sons' lives fall from the grandeur of their dreams. Salesman, allegedly a water-shed piece and oft-noted for the resonances of its characterization, plays out as a constant exercise in humiliation for each major figure - Willy's sense of self crumbles, son Happy is revealed a feckless hypocrite, son Biff bumbles along as a ne'er-do-well, and wife Linda sits helplessly, dumbly by. Unlike the psychodramas of Ibsen or Chekhov, Miller's exercise is rendered in a deliberate manner, with more brutality than compassion.

Miller is not one for subtlety and the didacticism of this play appears from its first page onwards, even permeating the opening stage directions. "Before us is the Salesman's house," they read. "We are aware of towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides. Only the blue light of sky falls upon the house and fore-stage; the surrounding area shows an angry glow of orange. As more light appears we see a solid vault of apartment houses, a dream rising out of reality." Hmmm, do ya' think Miller's suggesting that Willy finds himself alienated and adrift in an otherwise hostile environment? Do ya think Willy's grip on reality is tentative at best?

The play's formal conceit consists of an intermingling of flashbacks with scenes of the present day. The set, like the temporal framework, is equally fluid. (Oh boy, so it's half a memory play! Genius!) Would that Miller had extended some of this fluidity to his tone and characters, each is more stolid than the last, swirled up in an air of unbearable gravitas. When moments of levity occur (and they rarely do), they typically seem unintended by the playwright. When Biff, the elder of Willy's sons says, "This farm I work on, it's spring there now, see? And they've got about fifteen new colts. There's nothing more inspiring or - beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt. And it's cool there now, see? Texas is cool now, and it's spring." And Happy, the younger, answers giddily, "You're a poet, you know that, Biff? You're a - you're an idealist !" I don't think Miller is being funny on purpose.

As if the theme of the play - the tragic life and hollow dreams of each little man - isn't abundantly clear throughout (the lighting and music cues positively scream it), Miller can't leave well enough alone and has to hammer it home near the first act's close. Linda, chiding Biff, says, "Willy Loman never made a lot of money, his name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being and terrible things happen to him so attention must be paid... . Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."

Not on a theatrical level it needn't.

It isn't difficult to comprehend why actors might like to work on a Miller play - male actors, anyway. He writes men rich in tantrums, weariness and far-off longing. An actor in a Miller role has ample opportunity to show off, maybe even shine. But it remains a mystery why directors and playwrights, who assumedly have a thought in their heads, would join in saluting Arthur Miller as our century's greatest - over the formal plays of Beckett, the terse languagescapes of Pinter, the experimentation of O'Neill, the characters of Williams. What hath the theatrical community wrought?

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