Miller's Theater
the forms of modern drama
Dr. Tonya Howe
Marymount University
March 2012
What form should a modern American
tragedy take?
“[I sought a form, in Death of a Salesman, that] could
reflect what I had always sensed as the unbroken
tissue that was man and society, a single unit rather
than two.”
--Miller, Timebends: An Autobiography (182)
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts:
Realism and Naturalism
Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian, 1828-1906, father of
modern drama)
Brought politically and socially “unsafe” subjects,
like alcoholism, the hypocrisies of Victorian society,
class struggle, into the theater.
Realism is characterized by intense detail, scientific
observation.
Aesthetics/Style correlates with politics.
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts:
Realism and Naturalism
Realism and naturalism (slightly different movements,
but “realism” is used to describe the basic scenic
approach, where “naturalism” is used to describe a
political sensibility)
Darwin's evolutionary theories astonished the world in
the 19th century, social movements organized around
class consciousness becoming more prevalent—both
challenged traditional forms of authority
Theater of the 4th wall; sought to maintain an illusion of
reality. But, that illusion depended also on the audience's
completion of the illusion through imagination.
American naturalism: Mielziner and Kazan's production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar
Named Desire (1947)
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts:
Realism and Naturalism
Naturalism takes up the question of the position of
the individual in a hostile world of social,
economic, political forces.
Less psychological or plot driven, more emphasis
placed on class struggle in an economic system
hostile to the working classes.
Determinism? Individual agency?
August Strindberg, Miss Julie (1888)
As far as the technical side of the work is concerned I
have made the experiment of abolishing the division into
acts. This is because I have come to the conclusion that
our capacity for illusion is disturbed by the intervals...
As regards the scenery I have borrowed from
impressionist paintings its asymmetry and its economy;
thus, I think, strengthening the illusion. For the fact that
one does not see the whole room and all the furniture
leaves room for conjecture...
Another much needed innovation is the abolition of
footlights. This lighting from below is said to have the
purpose of making the actors' faces fatter. But why, I ask,
should all actors have fat faces?
August Strindberg, Miss Julie (1888)
[The] judgement of authors—this man is stupid, that
one brutal, this jealous, that stingy and so forth—
should be challenged by the naturalists who know the
richness of the soul-complex and realise that vice has
a reverse side very much like virtue. Because they are
modern characters, living in a period of transition more
feverish than its predecessor at least, I have drawn my
figures vacillating, disintegrated, a blend of old and
new...
My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and
present stages of civilisation, bits from books and
newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of
fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul.
Realism and Naturalism
Maxim Gorky's (1868-1936) The Lower Depths (1902), at the Moscow Art and Popular Theatre
Note the intense realism, the clear focus on class struggle. The play takes place in a flop-house
inhabited by criminals.
Acting Contexts: Method Acting
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Constantin Stanislavski (Russian, Moscow Art
Theater, 1863-1938)
Believable emotion and realistic characters produced
through physical actions; a “grammar of acting”
Influenced by the systematic exploration of interiority
(Freud)
Acting Contexts: Method Acting
Surfaces conceal a much more important well of action
and emotion—emphasis is on emotional or
psychological reality underlying the visible.
Assumes a psycho-physical union between interior
and exterior.
Method actors use actions to control their emotions;
actors can “live” in pauses as well as words. They
react instead of acting, fully inhabiting their characters.
“Staying in character.”
Photographs of Death of a Salesman. Darby, Life Magazine, 1949.
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts:
Expressionism
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Anti-realist movement in theater that starts in
Germany in early 20th century, but spreads to
America, chiefly in the work of Eugene O'Neill and
Clifford Odets in the 1920s-1940s.
Clearest articulation in Bertholt Brecht [1898-1956]
Dismissed “Aristotelian” concepts of unity that led to
theater becoming, as he saw it, about mere
entertainment placating the masses.
A photograph of the original set of Death of a Salesman. Darby, Life Magazine, 1949. Note
the naturalism of the set; but note, too, the exposed roofline, an expressionistic influence.
A sketch by Jo Mielziner for the 1949 set design of Death of a Salesman. Miller's original
concept of the set was more naturalistic, but Mielziner made substantial suggestions that
Miller later incorporated as the stage directions you see in the text. Note the shadows of the
apartment buildings in the background.
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts:
Expressionism
Highly symbolic, expressive of interior states; also highly
political and critical of bourgeois values of realism,
established authority and codes of meaning
Realizes this interiority, critical aspect through external
scenic means: angles, dramatic lighting, sounds
divorced from realistic narrative
Rejected the idea that we should “enjoy” or “fall into”
theater—broke the illusion of the 4th wall.
Verfremdungseffekt: overt theatricality, defamiliarize the
audience's expectation, alienation effect.
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts:
Expressionism
“Can we speak of money in iambics?...
Petroleum resists the five-act form; today's
catastrophes do not progress in a straight line
but in cyclical crises... Even to dramatize a
simple newspaper report one needs something
much more than the dramatic technique of ...an
Ibsen.”
--Bertholt Brecht
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts: Expressionism
Paul Green and Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson (1936).
Theatrical and Scenic
Contexts:
Expressionism
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), American expressionist.
Here is a later production of his 1920s play, The Hairy
Ape. Note the use of distorted perspective and
destabilizing angles, intense lighting effects, stark
cutouts. This seeks to evoke (or “express”) a repressive
social regime. O'Neill was very radical for an American
playwright, and highly controversial.
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts:
Absurdist Theater
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Anti-realist movement in theater; another form of
experimental theater
Developed in 1950s and 1960s
Like expressionism, contrary to bourgeois values of
realism, established authority and codes of meaning
Major themes and stylistic elements emphasized
man’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning
Nonsense, experimental, tragicomedy
Theatrical and Scenic Contexts: Absurdism
Beckett, Waiting For Godot (1955)
Miller's Scenic Ideology?
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American theatrical context in the 1940s was
generally conservative, traditional, realistic, nonpolitical, though there were experimental dramatists
and directors working in the field.
Miller drew both on realism and expressionism
...but rejected both in their entirety. Instead, he
worked to create something new, a synthesis
between them.
Miller's Scenic Ideology?
Untempered absurdism and expressionism represent man as
nothing more than a cosmic victim, a piece of flotsam in a vast
ocean over which he has absolutely no control.
But untempered realism suggests that all is as it seems to be,
that man can indeed master the so-harsh environment that
determines his existence. In realism, cause clearly leads to
effect, and realist plays take command of that narrative for
social purposes.
In Salesman he merges the realistic and the expressionistic.
Neither wholly realistic nor wholly expressionistic, Salesman
draws on both techniques to suggest social responsibility and
individual agency.
Miller's Scenic Ideology?
Miller rejected the coldness of much expressionistic theater,
and he also rejected the abstraction of expressionism,
futurism, and absurdism. Yet, he also rejects a simplistically
mechanistic view of the causal narrative and scenic elements
of realism/naturalism, as we will see in Salesman.
In strict naturalism, expressionism, and absurdism, man is
wholly determined by his environment—at its mercy, we might
say.
He felt that theater, in order for it to be effective, needed to
strike the audience with authentic emotion about man's
relationship to the world he inhabits—it needs to tell a story
that seeks to bring light to the unseen, hidden causes that set
that story in motion.
Miller's Scenic Ideology?
His work, especially Death of a Salesman, is marked by
stylistic experimentation. But, Instead, he insists that there be,
in art, “an explicit commitment of some kind to a more
humane vision of life” (Bigsby 7)--and this is the Liberal realist
in him.
In general, Miller's plays are concerned with the fate of the
individual in a mechanistic and inhumane, even potentially
totalitarian, system. But, he does not overwhelm or elide the
individual with the impossibility of the system.
Man is not a “cosmic victim” (11), but a failed agent; he is
essentially flawed, paralyzed by deference to authority, unable
to “become the protagonist of one's own drama” (10-11).
Liberalism and the Humane Tragedy of
the Common Man
For Miller's characters there is always possible an image of a
better future. His heroes are common people facing the reality
of social inequity, and yet they can assert control over their
fate—they are not, or should not be, controlled by it, as in the
Greek drama that so influenced him.
The tragedy of his characters is that they are primarily
observers, not actors in their own stories—they are “unwilling,
often through guilt, sometimes through fear, to intervene on
their own behalf or to acknowledge their responsibility toward
others” (3-4).
His plays seek to show something important to the
audience—to help them see, remember, and overcome.
Art and the Elevation of the Everyday
While Miller was writing in 1949, he was responding to a
cultural moment not unlike our own. Art has a “special
responsibility” in the wake of trauma. Miller's investment in the
individual and the humane is evident in his stylistic choices.
What is the role of art in a world that has witnessed—or
forgotten—the Holocaust? That has witnessed—or forgotten—
World War II? The crushing, daily experience of poverty?
What is the role of art in a world that has witnessed—and not
yet forgotten—Neda Agha Soltan's murder, or the selfimmolation of Mohamed Bouazizi?
For Miller—and for humankind in general, perhaps—it must
express the “fundamental community of mutually dependent
individuals” (Bigsby 5).
Art and the Elevation of the Everyday
“[I sought a form, in Death of a Salesman, that] could
reflect what I had always sensed as the unbroken
tissue that was man and society, a single unit rather
than two.”
--Miller, Timebends: A Life (182)
Reading Assignment:
Re-read Act I of Death of a Salesman
Read “Tragedy and the Common Man”
Thank you!