Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller
1915-2005: American Playwright

Roundabout Theatre Company mourns the passing of Arthur Miller, one of the great late 20th century American playwrights. He had reached the age of 89 when he passed away on February 10, 2005 in his Connecticut home.

“To me,” Arthur Miller wrote in the 1960s, “the theatre is not a disconnected entertainment... It's the sound and the ring of the spirit of the people at any one time. It is where a collective mass of people, through the genius of some author, is able to project its terrors and its hopes...”

Miller was “some author” indeed. Roundabout's artistic director, Todd Haimes felt a profound connection to the playwright and as a producer of many of Miller's great works, found their relationship to be immensely rewarding. Miller was there for a producer in the way a truly great playwright should be —enthusiastic, accessible, supportive and helpful. And that's just what he was, even during Roundabout's most recent revival, After the Fall. At the age of 89, Miller had remained active at rehearsals, working diligently with director Michael Mayer to realize that production's objective.

Miller's vision will be missed, especially his yearning for a humanistic and compassionate society in which thoughtful citizens always make the right moral and ethical choices. His plays are monuments to what happens if we don't make good choices: Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, View from the Bridge, The Price, and The Man Who Had All the Luck, all of which Roundabout helped revive in recent years.

“Miller wrote plays that everyone, whatever their stature or educational background, could relate to,” Haimes told USA Today. “And they're so perfectly constructed from a plot standpoint that they work whether you see them done at a high school or on a professional level.” Such is a sure sign of genius: for Miller as an artist was both popular and pioneering.

Born in New York City on October 17, 1915, Miller grew up in Brooklyn and attended the University of Michigan. His biography is invariably footnoted by his brief but turbulent marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956 and his refusal to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both required a certain kind of courage. But for all the plays, stories, essays, and awards he managed in his lifetime, Miller's greatest gift to the American theatre was his simple, steadfast advocacy for the necessity of the art form, and his insistence that “attention must be paid” to theatre artists.

While accepting his lifetime achievement award at the 1999 Tony Awards® ceremony, Miller challenged Broadway producers –and, indirectly, Broadway audiences. “I hope that a new dimension and fresh resolve will inspire the powers that be to welcome fiercely ambitious playwrights,” he said. “And that the time will come again when they will find a welcome for their big, world-challenging plays, somewhere west of London and somewhere east of the Hudson River.”

In theatres around the world, the ring of his spirit will sound for generations.

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