Theater: The Miller’s Tale

After the Fall. After more than eight years of silence, Arthur Miller returns to the stage and launches the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater in a torrent of self-revelation. His new play is a memory book of betrayals, a soliloquy with his conscience, an exorcism of guilt, an intimate manual of bad marriages, a chronicle of the birth of a writer, a dirge for the death of love, and underlying all, a tormented but intellectualized quest for self-justification.

The Furies who pursue the playwright are his mother, his first wife, and his second wife, Marilyn Monroe. The transparent disguising of himself as a lawyer named Quentin and of Marilyn as a bigtime songstress named Maggie exists to be penetrated, and Miller’s uninhibited autobiographical candor poses for playgoer and critic alike the disconcerting task of judging the conduct of his life and his code for the conduct of life. Yet to dispute Miller’s moral conclusions, or lack of them, is not to deny the jarring impact of his play, which Director Elia Kazan has charged with theatrical electricity. Fall is endlessly fascinating, emotionally harrowing, and consumingly committed to telling the truth as Miller sees it.

In craggy-faced despair and large-voiced grief, Jason Robards Jr. roams the bare multileveled arena stage of the center’s temporary Greenwich Village home to narrate and act out the Miller’s tale in a brilliant, grueling, three-hour performance. In the beginning, there was Mom. She is an angry, unfulfilled woman whose passport to college was revoked by a family-arranged marriage with a shipping merchant whom she regards as her inferior and lashes with verbal contempt. Infused with guilt by the warring parents and wanting to make up to Mom for her frustration and unhappiness, the boy takes his cues and values from the mother. “I want your handwriting beautiful, darling,” she says, and the writer in Miller is given a beginning.

Wife No. 1 (Mariclare Costello) is a variation on Mom. She is steely, self-contained; he is cold, remote, self-centered. The pair deny themselves to each other. He is parched for the reassurance that he is capable of love, when Maggie-Marilyn sits beside him on a park bench. She appeals to his Pygmalion complex, the power to shape another human being. He pities her vulnerability, admires her gift for living in the present without justifying her actions or impulses. To her he is a wondrous king—of books. Each weds his own deepest inadequacy, his for love, hers for learning. In an exquisitely modulated performance, Barbara Loden never mimics Marilyn Monroe so far as to mock her, and when the self-destructive ordeal of drink and barbiturates begins, she becomes as pitiably touching as the drowning Ophelia.

During this ordeal, Quentin-Miller is agonized but strangely inhumane. In one telling scene where Maggie-Marilyn is crawling across the floor begging him to take the pills away from her, he lectures her with stony and selfish Freudian logic: “I take them; and then we fight, and then I give them up, and you take the death from me. You see what’s happening? You’ve been setting me up for a murder.”

In After the Fall, Arthur Miller really wants the playgoer to take those pills, to share his guilt and pronounce his absolution. He finds a more personal forgiveness in a third wife (Salome Jens), who having lived with the guilty horrors of concentration camps is capable of coping with what Miller apparently regards as the equivalent tragedy of his own life. “You have got to start facing the consequences of your actions,” says the hero of Fall, but he never lives by that precept. He shows little remorse for abandoning his first wife and child, or leaving his second in mortal peril, whether or not she could have been saved from suicide.

The code of Fall is: when life seems unbearable, find a new woman and start a new life. Apart from ignoring duty, such a code lacks all tragic sense.