By John Woodford

Photos by Bob Kalmbach

LSA alumnus Arthur Miller '37 returned to campus in June to present the College's first Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in the inaugural season of the U-M's Festival of New Works. The first recipient of the $3,000 award was Willy Holtzman for his play Hearts, a World War II drama that debuted at the Trueblood Theater.

At a press conference before the ceremonies, Miller said he could never predict how one of his plays would be received and "wouldn't have bet a dime" on the fate of his most-produced play, The Crucible.

"I started it in the middle of the McCarthy era," Miller recalled, who said that he is currently working on an essay "The Crucible in History." "People were scared of it or hated it," he continued, "All you can do is make something as good as you can make it. After that, the world decides."

Miller said he was attracted to the U-M in the 1930s because tuition "was cheap–about $60, I think–and I'd heard they gave Hopwood awards to student writers. For a 19-year-old who knew he wanted to write even though I didn't know what I'd write, the fact that the University gave a dollar prize meant they took writing seriously here."

The varying interpretations of his plays and characters by directors and actors have always interested him, Miller said. The current Broadway production of Death of a Salesman–this year's top Tony Award winner with four–"is more modern than the original, which was romantic," Miller said. "This one is like a black-and-white movie, more strident, right from the shoulder. Actors aren't monkeys. They are interpreters. Some find a tone you hadn't heard before."

Elizabeth Franz plays Linda Loman, Willy's wife, "180 degrees differently from the original production," Miller noted. "Linda is usually very passive, but she [Franz] plays her angrily and aggressively, because the wife knows Willy's suicidal yet their sons and the world are not helping him. It's brand new and yet seems truer to the part."

Miller said he was troubled about the economic threats to the American theater "as far as new writing is concerned." He said that the difficulty of getting a straight play–that is, one that is not a musical or an import from England or Ireland–produced on Broadway today was spreading to Off-Broadway as well.

"Does our society want traditional theater to continue?" he asked. If so, he said, it must face the fact that "the question of subsidies for the arts will be more important as time proceeds. Our theater could be crippled if there are none," while dramas from countries that subsidize theater fill the vacuum.

Of America's current delight in entertainment with high-tech features, noise and violence, Miller observed that history indicates that "where there is spectacle, you can be pretty sure the drama is dying. It never could compete with a brace of horses galloping across the stage."

Although he feels that "none of my plays would be produced as a new play today," he is nevertheless optimistic "because people still want to write plays, others want to act, and people want to see them. We just need to confront and cure the economic problem."

The U-M's current quest to establish an Arthur Miller Theater pleases him, he said, and he'd love to write an inaugural play for such a facility. Whether he could succeed is another matter, he added, because "it's easier to build a theater that will stand up than to write a play that will."