Playwright Arthur Miller dies

Arthur Miller, the conscience of American theater and one of its greatest playwrights, died of heart failure Thursday at his home in Roxbury, Conn., at 89.

Together with Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, Mr. Miller made American theater a force on the international scene. His early masterpieces, ''All My Sons" (1947) and ''Death of a Salesman" (1949), chronicled America's postwar dreams and nightmares -- how the country measured personal success and failure.

Christopher Bigsby, the writer who played something of a Boswell to Mr. Miller's Johnson, has noted how the Depression hovers over many of his plays, but the body of his work covers many of the major events of the 20th century: World War II (''All My Sons," ''Incident at Vichy"), the Holocaust (''Playing for Time," ''Broken Glass"), McCarthyism (''The Crucible"), and the change from Roosevelt-style liberalism to Reagan-style conservatism or consumerism (''The Ride Down Mt. Morgan").

Theatergoers, though, have not turned to Mr. Miller as a historian of the American century but as a chronicler of the American soul: souls in torment (the brothers in ''The Price") and souls on ice (Willy Loman in ''Death of a Salesman"), but mostly souls in conflict (the Proctors in ''The Crucible"), trying to do the right thing while weighted down with all the forces that would have them do the practical thing.

Mr. Miller took great pride in the seeming universality of his work. Willy Loman's declaration, ''I still feel -- kind of temporary about myself" is not a bad summing up of the problems of identity in the 20th century. ''Death of a Salesman" worked as well when it was staged in China in 1983, and the system that ground down the Asian Willy was hardly a capitalist one.

As Mr. Miller said in ''Timebends," his autobiography, ''When [Loman] roared out, 'I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!' it came as a nearly revolutionary declaration after what was now thirty-four years of leveling. . . . I had not reckoned [when writing the play] on a young Chinese student saying, 'We are moved by it because we also want to be number one, and to be rich and successful.' "

Artistic success must have seemed a long way off to the young Arthur Miller, the second of three children, born Oct. 17, 1915, to Isidore and Augusta Miller in Brooklyn. There was material success from Isidore's clothing business until the Depression.

Mr. Miller earned enough to go to the University of Michigan in 1939, studying journalism and theater, and winning several playwriting awards. He married Mary Grace Slattery, with whom he had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert, who survive him.

His first professional triumph was ''All My Sons," which opened on Broadway in 1947 following a run in Boston. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and was followed by ''Death of a Salesman" (with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. More success, though somewhat muted by the Cold War atmosphere in the country, followed with the Tony Award-winning ''The Crucible" in 1953 and ''A View From the Bridge" in 1955.

The following year brought Mr. Miller to the attention of all Americans, not just theatergoers, when he testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and, unlike colleagues Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan, refused to name names of Communists or leftists with whom he had associated.

"Arthur never compromised," playwright Edward Albee said by telephone yesterday. ''He never sold out, he never did anything just for that awful word entertainment. His understanding was that something that was entertaining was filled with ideas. That's the best definition of entertainment, of course. He was able to use art and his enormously important social and political points and make them so skillfully that people never thought they were being hit over the head."

Mr. Miller divorced his wife in 1956 and married Marilyn Monroe, for whom he wrote the John Huston film ''The Misfits." The marriage ended in 1961. He married Ingeborg Morath, an Austrian-born photographer, the following year. Morath died in 2002.

Even during Mr. Miller's early, golden period, he was not without his critics. Robert Brustein, who retired in 2002 as artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, dismissed him as a secondary dramatist unable ''to understand the metaphysical nature of tragedy." Brustein also wrote, ''When Arthur Miller evokes our sympathy for the common man, we are confronted less with works of art than with political acts or social gestures, and it is by utilitarian rather than literary criteria that such acts and gestures should be judged."

For his part, Mr. Miller was not shy about expressing disdain for theater that appealed only to the intelligentsia. In a 1996 Globe interview, he attributed the enthusiastic postwar response to serious plays on Broadway to the more inclusive attitude of playwrights such as himself and Tennessee Williams:

''For all our differences, both Tennessee and I felt that we wanted to embrace the big audience, we didn't want simply to creep into the art audience. . . . [Our plays were] addressed to anybody. You don't have to juggle philosophic concepts. They're not in any way arcane or difficult to grasp. They can lead you somewhere that's interesting, but they insist on meeting you on your terms."

While Mr. Miller remained politically active through the 1960s and 1970s -- he was president of the international writers' group, PEN, in 1965 and a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the tumultuous Democratic Convention in 1968 -- his plays were not faring well in New York, except for ''The Price" in 1968. Critics began to dismiss him as moralistic and turgid.

Mr. Miller was, however, the toast of another town. His plays, both new and old, earned considerably more attention in London where many theaters -- the Royal National Theatre, in particular -- championed his work, culminating with a gala celebration in 1995 for his 80th birthday.

Why the discrepancy between English and American attitudes? In the interview with the Globe, Mr. Miller attributed it to England's subsidized theaters, which allowed them to take risks.

There are other theories. In an introduction to the program for some interviews Mr. Miller conducted for the National Theatre, Bigsby noted that English audiences had more perspective on the playwright. '''The Crucible,' which opened to a frosty reception on Broadway," he wrote, ''was never seen solely in terms of McCarthyism in Europe. 'After the Fall,' whose American premiere was marked by a distracting controversy over its supposed portrait of Marilyn Monroe, was seen here as a study of human fallibility."

The critic and producer Harold Clurman put it more poetically in his 1970 introduction to ''The Portable Arthur Miller," writing, ''We [Americans] are enveloped in a mood of chaotic rage and negation. We are apparently so disappointed in ourselves, so distraught and disgusted by the shortcomings of our civilization . . . that we seem to resent any affirmative counter-statement. . . . Europeans have for a long time now given voice to this mood, with considerable artistic ingenuity and poignancy.... Now they are sick of their own sickness, because, sick or not, they must live."

Clurman might have been prescient, because Mr. Miller has been the subject of a very healthy revival in this country since 1995, based largely on revivals of his older plays, although there has also been a greater appreciation for newer material.

The Williamstown Theatre Festival, under Michael Ritchie's directorship, has staged several Miller plays, many of which have moved to Broadway, including ''The Price," ''All My Sons," and his early play, ''The Man Who Had All the Luck." Ritchie also presented the American premiere of ''The Ride Down Mt. Morgan," with F. Murray Abraham.

''I think there is a social conscience in Arthur's plays that is not thrown in your face," said Ritchie, now the artistic director of the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, where he oversees the Mark Taper Forum and other theaters. ''You discover it as the play unfolds. The important thing about his plays is what I walk away with. They don't leave me. They keep coming back."

There have been few seasons in recent years where there has not been a major revival of Mr. Miller's work in New York. Along with the three from Williamstown there were ''The Crucible" from England with Liam Neeson, a dazzling ''View From the Bridge" with Anthony LaPaglia that began off-Broadway, and Tony-winning productions of the Goodman Theatre's ''Death of a Salesman," which originated in Chicago with Brian Dennehy.

"The thing that's amazing is the currency that it has with audiences," said Dennehy by phone yesterday. ''People have hysterical reactions to it, and become upset after the performance. The family stuff resonated with audiences no matter where they were. Whatever he captured about America, he captured some reality. I can't tell you how many incidents we had during the run of that play -- people almost cried out because of the impact it had, what it meant to their own experience."

Brustein has also come around to a more positive view of Mr. Miller's work. ''He was an artist of profound integrity, our theater's elder statesman, and his loss diminishes us greatly," he said by e-mail.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Mr. Miller twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and was given an Olivier Award en by the Society of London Theatre) in 1993 for ''Broken Glass." ''Death of a Salesman" and ''The Crucible" won Tony Awards as best play in 1949 and 1953, respectively, and Mr. Miller was also given best author Tonys for ''All My Sons" in 1947 and ''Salesman" as well as a Special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999.

Though Mr. Miller was hardly a rigid moralist, his characters do inhabit a moral universe, one in which the present cannot escape the past or be heedless about the future. ''It is not quite enough to know how to escape restrictions," he wrote. ''Sooner or later one has to think about arriving somewhere." Miller's characters are constantly trying to evade responsibility for their actions, and ultimately they pay a price.

Although he wasn't religious, Mr. Miller credited his Jewish upbringing for that moral sense, or at least a determination not to give in to a ''Waiting for Godot" void: ''My resistance to despair seems to have something Jewish about it; some vagrant cell floating through my blood seems to demand that however remote and unlikely ever to be found, a ray of light has to remain after darkness has closed in, a glow of redemption must appear up there at the rim of the pit or the tale is something less than true."

When a production of one of Mr. Miller's plays was on target, such as Dennehy's ''Salesman" or LaPaglia's ''View From the Bridge," you could feel the force of both his art and that glow of redemption running through the theater like an electric current. These were American tragedies that, as he said, anyone could relate to.

If the death of Willy Loman reminds us how elusive the American Dream can be, the death of Arthur Miller reminds us of how great the American theater can be.

In addition to the children from his first marriage, Mr. Miller leaves a daughter, Rebecca.

Jim Sullivan of the Globe staff contributed to this report.