Volume 2, Number 2 · March 5, 1964
Broken Blossoms
By Jonathan Miller
After the Fall
by Arthur Miller, directed by Elia Kazan
Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center
After the Fall
by Arthur Miller
Viking, 146 pp., $3.95
There is a sort of lower intestinal theory going about these days to account for and perhaps excuse the current fiasco at the Theater of the Lincoln Arts Center. The argument being that After the Fall must be regarded as something which Arthur Miller had to get out of his system and that if only people had the decency to leave him alone (Christ! Fair's fair!) he will now come out with something really big (He's already working on the new play, y'know.) This spiritual gastro-enterology has never seemed very convincing; I do not appreciate the categorical imperative for getting things out of the system—or at least not in public. Moreover there seems to be no reason to suspect, from what he has done in the past, that this present evacuation is going to be followed by anything at all, except perhaps more of the same. Arthur Miller has always been the owner of a sound, but essentially minor, talent and no amount of purgation can improve the quality of whatever there may be to follow. As it is, however, those qualities which he has, substantial as they are, always seem to overreach themselves, straining after a magnitude for which they are simply not fitted. And in the few years that he has been away, on Sinai it would seem, Miller has developed an absurd literary hubris, puffing himself up like an idiotic bull-frog in Aesop.
Review, 1109 words
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