[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Theprecludes people like Abe from owning their ownSimons struggle to survive, caught between theirbusinesses.They are happy to see Arnold arriveown employees and the larger companies that for-safely home, as the grandfather lights candles toever threaten such small businesses.mark the Sabbath.There are, as the title indicates, no real villainsThe second act opens at the Simon Coat andin the play, just a 1930s middle-class family react-Suit Company and literally divides the stageing to a rapidly changing world.It is the system, ifbetween the workers and management.This sym-anything, that is at fault, and the central conflictbolizes their actual separation in the world of busi-is between private interest and a wider public con-ness.Shipping clerks throughout the area havecern.The father finds change the hardest and pre-gone on strike, affecting the business, which can-figures All My Sons’ Joe Keller in his desire always not get orders delivered.Abe wants his sons toto put family first.He sees the world in terms ofhelp him break the strike as he has not the funds“dog eat dog” where every man must fight for him-to repay his bank loan.While Ben is sympatheticself.The brothers’ struggle to find an acceptableto his demands, Arnold is adamantly against them,way ahead that includes a greater responsibilityand tension mounts in a series of scenes that depicttoward others (just like Keller’s sons), being at oddsthe family’s attempts to make deliveries and staywith their father’s belief, provides the core of thesolvent.In the midst of this, the grandfather dies,play’s drama.and the bank forecloses the business.No Villain is not great drama, but for a first play, In a minor subplot, a rich manufacturer, Roth,it shows promise and points to areas of interest andproposes that Ben marry his daughter Helen sotechniques that would become trademarks of Mill-that he might groom Ben as his heir, but Bener’s work.After a humorous beginning, the playobjects to this solution.The final act begins withfamily and friends sitting around the grandfather’sevolves into an intense family drama, pitting fathercoffin in the parlor.When Roth arrives with Helenagainst sons, brother against brother.Although theand tries to talk about a future union, Ben growsplay depends too much on speeches over dialogueangry, sends away the mourners, and declares histo convey its issues, it is a more finely realized piece intention to begin a new kind of business that isthan much agitprop of the period.Unlike agitprop,more committed to its workers.Through this, Benit offers a wider social perspective, more detailedarticulates the issue of responsibility beyond thecharacters, and a greater display of sympathy forindividual; despite his support of his father, he hasthose beyond the working class; indeed, its workingthroughout the play espoused left-wing convic-class is peripheralized, present but voiceless.Thetions.However, his final vision is vague at best,workers at Abe’s business mutely work through theoffering little in the way of a concrete solution:crisis, hardly cognizant of what is happening; the“I’ve got to build something bigger.Somethingstrikers are kept offstage, and we are aware thatthat won’t allow this to happen.Somethinggreater business powers are in control here.It isthat’ll change this deeply.to the bottom.”within the family that the play’s true conflict lies,Arnold, evidently Miller’s alter ego and mouth-although that family represents a microcosm ofpiece—even being called “Art” several times inthe larger society in all of the social divisions andthe play—is overshadowed by Ben.Arnold spoutsuncertainties of its time.023-354_Miller-p2.indd 2575/3/07 12:52:43 PM258 “Notes on Realism”“Notes on Realism” (1999)the fact that his plays were so manifestly written.”Referring to Odets’s stylized dialogue as “personalOriginally published in Harper’s, this essay was soon jazz” with “slashes of imagery,” Miller acknowl-after reprinted in Echoes Down the Corridor (2000).edges its poetic influence on him as a writer.JustIn it, Miller relates what he feels to be 20th-centuryas he refutes any limiting description of Odets as asocial realist, he makes similar claims regarding theU.S.drama’s greatest accomplishments, against acontributions of Tconsideration of how the termENNESSEE WILLIAMS.AlthoughREALISM might bea play like The Glass Menagerie has been termedbetter judged and applied.The essay begins byrealism on psychological terms, Williams’s work isMiller noting changes to BROADWAY, which he nofilled with symbolism and a “tragic vision” beyondlonger views as a place of U.S.theatrical innova-conventional realistic plays.EUGENE O’NEILL was ation.A new play like The Crucible, he asserts, would more openly “aesthetic rebel,” but this made him annot be produced in the current Broadway climate,“isolated phenomenon” on Broadway.His refusalalthough he later admits that it has always been dif-to worry about commercial popularity freed him toficult to have any serious play produced.Part of theexperiment with “the unfamiliar world of spirit andcurrent problem is the soaring cost of productionmetaphysic” that so marks his plays.Most popularand the domination of the New York Times overplaywrights, however, Miller insists, depend uponreviews.However, even where stylistic innovationa veneer of realism to please the audience, evenis promoted, Miller finds much of it more trendywhile the better ones play with the form.than fulfilling, largely because too many artists areLooking beyond U.S.drama at the language ofunnecessarily antagonistic to their work being seenIrish playwrights Sean O’Casey and J.M.Synge,as realistic
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]