Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) is one of the most recognized playwrights in the world. However, he became famous not only because of his literary genius. In 1956, he married his second wife – Marilyn Monroe. From then on, Miller was in the limelight. 

His life was marked by one more event. Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy decided to take advantage of the nation’s fear of communism. In 1950, he declared that he had a list of 205 people in the State Department who belonged to the American Communist Party. Panic spread. During that era, innocent people from different walks of life were accused of supporting/being communists without sound evidence. As a result, many lives, careers and friendships were destroyed. What is more, the House Committee on Un-American Activities decided to crack down on the Hollywood film industry. Actors, producers, writers were summoned to appear before the committee and reveal names of their colleagues who might have been communists. Those who cooperated with the HUAC could continue their activities. Those who refused were cited for contempt while their names appeared on the Hollywood black list. Arthur Miller was summoned before the HUAC because one of friends mentioned his name during the investigation. The playwright refused to cooperate with the committee and was charged with contempt of the Congress. Miller’s conviction was, fortunately, overturned on appeal.

Was Miller a communists? The answer is: NO. During the 1930s, the playwright and other artists attended a small discussion group that discussed regularly the philosophy of communism. However, they quite quickly reached the conclusion that this system of government is a failure and abandoned their meetings.

Here is a short list of Miller’s best known woks:

• All my Sons (1947)
• Death of a Salesman (1949) – Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony Award for Best Play, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award 
• The Crucible (1953)
• A View from the Bridge (1955)
• The Misfits (1961) – screenplay
• Broken Glass (1993) – the Olivier Award for Best Play 
• The Crucible (1996) – screenplay

by Marta Makoś

The Crucible - December 15th 2014

“Great plays can change their meaning with the passing of time and shifts in attitudes.”

Charles Spencer

Last month, Book Lovers Among Students met to discuss Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953) written in response to the mass hysteria of the 1950s in the USA as well as the betrayal of his friend. The play explores the universal mechanisms of terror and mass hatred fueled by fears of the unknown. It is based on true people and events. Although dialogues are fictional, when writing, Miller resorted to the available Court documents from that time. During our discussion, we tried to answer the following questions: What led to these trials? What does the title mean? How can this play be interpreted these days? Finally, we also devoted a great deal of time to the analysis of the protagonists and adaptations of the Crucible, including the famous film from 1996 staring Winona Ryder and Daniel Day Lewis (who is Miller’s son-in-law).   

by Marta Makoś

[2014-06-04] Fucking A

This Wednesday, we met to discuss a controversial play Fucking A (2000) by Suzan-Lori Parks who decided to claim Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel: “I’m going to write a play, a riff on The Scarlet Letter, and I’m going to call it Fucking A! Ha, ha, ha!” * At that time, Parks was joking, as she hadn’t read the novel. Nevertheless, this idea was preying on her mind for a very long time and, finally, the play saw the light of day.

Suzan-Lori Parks (1963 - )

Suzan-Lori Parks, an African-American playwright and screenwriter, was born on 10^th May 1963 in Fort Knox, Kentucky into a military family. As a child, she developed a taste for folklore, mythology as well as wrote numerous short stories and songs.

[2013-04-19] M. Butterfly

Our April meeting was devoted to “M. Butterfly”, a play by an Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang.  During the introductory presentation club members looked at various theatrical traditions Hwang was inspired by to write his masterpiece play. 

David Henry Hwang (1957 - )

          David Henry Hwang was born  in Los Angeles, CA , on August 11, 1957. He is the eldest child of Henry Yuan Hwang and Dorothy Hwang, first-generation immigrants from China. He graduated from Stanford University in 1979 with a BA in English. He also attended the Yale School of Drama. His literary career focused primarily on the illustration of Asian American social and political relations and the exploration of his Chinese heritage. 

DAVID MAMET (1947 - )

David Mamet is an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 30, 1947, in a Jewish family of a Polish descent. Mamet’s grandparents flee from Europe to pursue the American Dream at the very beginning of the 20th century. Mamet was raised in a typical American middle class family. Like many other immigrants, his parents built their status on denial of their Jewish past and were very much focused on acculturation. Although it may not seem like it at first glance, Jewishness, Jewish experience and identity are very important in Mamet’s work both on screen and on the page.

Mamet came to writing via acting. As a child actor he would appear, in instructional dramas on radio and television. When he went to Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in 1965, he studied theater theory as well as acting. Moreover, during his year off from the university, in 1968, he studied drama at the Stanislavsky-influenced Neighborhood Playhouse School in New York. Then, after graduating from Goddard, he worked as an acting teacher and cofounded the St. Nicholas Theater Company (later re-formed in Chicago as the St. Nicholas Players), which produced much of his early plays. Mamet has also taught acting and theater theory at the Yale Drama School and New York University. Though he never claimed to be a real actor or to have any capacity for it, the performance itself has become a central trope of his work.

The first play to put Mamet on the map was Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). First staged by the Organic Theater, voted best Chicago Play of the season, it was later transferred to Off Off and Off Broadway where it picked up an Obie Award. American Buffalo (1975) was staged on Broadway, with Robert Duvall, two years after its Chicago premiere.  It is the first of  what he has called his ‘gang tragedies,’ and it is about a group of tricksters who are conspiring to steal a coin collection from a wealthy man. For this play Mamet received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Also, the play was adapted for a 1996 film which starred Dustin Hoffman. However, his most popular play appeared almost ten years later. Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) deals primarily with the time in American history when succumbing to the rigid rules of brutal capitalism was being advanced as moral virtue. At first it did very little business in the US but when it opened to much praise in London, in 1983, New York producers picked it up and staged it at John Golden Theater. Then it  was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and, as a consequence, run on Broadway for 378 performances. From that moment onwards, Mamet’s career opened up with revivals of his earlier work and a string of successes in the theater and the cinema. Also, he became more exposed to criticism. Mostly by feminists who accused him of being misogynist, not really including women in his work. Apparently, he took this criticism seriously since, in the 1990s, he did manage to include more female protagonists in his work. Speed-the-Plow (1988) and  Oleanna (1992) both explore female experience to some extent. The latter successfully registering contemporary debates over gender roles, political correctness and the idea of sexual harassment. His latest work includes plays titled November (2007) and Race (2009). Also, in 2011 Mamet published a controversial book titled The Secret Knowledge: On Dismantling of American Culture, in which he explains his recent conversion to conservatism. In December 2012 his new play The Anarchist will have its world premiere.

All in all, Mamet wrote 36 plays, 29 screenplays and several books on theater theory and criticism which makes him one of the most prolific dramatists in contemporary America. As Chistopher Bigsby puts it, "he is best known for his distinctive linguistic facility, his fascination with the brittle relationship between the sexes, the figure of the confidence trickster, and his concern with the moral vacuity at the heart of much experience.”

by Sylwia Chlebowska

selected sources:

The New York Times

The Village Voice

Broadway.com