Conversations with Arthur Miller
Conversations with Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller clearly enjoys militantly civil conversation. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Miller in interviews is his willingness to answer question after question with grace and substance, with a sense of social commitment and metaphysical curiosity.
These interviews complement the plays and his more formal and well-known theater essays, revealing his dramatic and aesthetic theories, his concern with language and structure, his awareness of the inner reality of his characters and how these concerns broaden to highlight universal social and metaphysical issues. Miller in conversation provides a unique insight into both the dramatic works and the man behind those works.
Through forty years of the best of Miller interviews, similar concerns surface, but with one crucial difference: the actor/audience barrier is minimized, and the listener is left with the delightful prospect of engaging Miller, not through Willy Loman or Kate Keller, or through critics “interpreting” the plays, but through the very person who reinvented so much of contemporary drama.
Matthew C. Roudané is professor of English and chair at Georgia State University. He is author of The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams and Approaches to Teaching Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” among other works.
