The current Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman at the Winter Garden Theatre received nine Tony nominations this week. In 1999, Death of a Salesman celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a Broadway revival—at the same theater as the present-day production—on the occasion of which Miller wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine, “On Broadway,” which excoriated the increasingly commercial pressures imposed on playwrights. “A play likely to alienate some part of the audience, as so many great plays have done, or whose style is strange or requires some effort to penetrate, simply will not get produced on today’s Broadway,” Miller writes. “George Bernard Shaw once remarked that businessmen always want to talk about art, but playwrights want to talk about business.” Following Miller’s essay, this edition of the From the Archive Newsletter includes: Mary McCarthy on the question of realism in the theater; the former Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham on postmodernism in performance and politics; and an essay on the Wooster Group, an experimental theatre troupe. To read these articles and gain access to our fully digitized archive, subscribe to Harper’s Magazine today.
[Essay]
On Broadway
Notes on the past and future of American theater
Arthur Miller, who began writing plays in the late Thirties, reflects on the shift in style in English-language commercial theater.
“Theater, like politics, is always the art of the possible. And when economics makes it impossible to employ more than four or five actors in a single unchanging set, when competition for actors by TV and films prevents them from maturing in theater work, when the cost of advertising makes it effectively impossible for a play to survive without nearly unanimous critical praise, it seems to me a shame to dismiss a play that is not camp simply because it moves an audience. Can’t it be art if it moves people?”
[Essay]
“Realism” in the American Theatre
How good are our “leading playwrights”?
In her 1961 essay, the American novelist and critic Mary McCarthy probes the condition of realism in the American theater.
“What we call realism, and particularly dramatic realism, tends to single out the ordinary man at the moment he might get into the newspaper. The criterion, in other words, is drawn from journalism. The ordinary man must become ‘news’ before he qualifies to be the protagonist of a realistic play or novel. The exceptional man is news at all times, but how can the ordinary man get into the paper? By committing a crime.”
Politics Nouveau
In the 1988 theatrical season, Lewis H. Lapham takes up a play that “abandons the foolish and antiquated device of a stage” to diagnose the term postmodern and its implications on culture and politics.
“Billed as ‘The Living Movie’ and playing to a full complement of guests for the better part of a year, Tamara quite clearly takes place within the realm of the hybrid sensibility known as the postmodern. The critics praised the salmon (served on toast points) as effusively as they praised the carpets and the enameled surfaces of the dialogue. Fortunately for the purposes of the national arts endowments, the term postmodern can be applied as freely as paint to any cultural surface not otherwise marked for exhibition in the Louvre or in one of Donald Trump’s hotels.”
[Letter from SoHo]
The Forty-Year Rehearsal
The Wooster Group’s endless work in progress
By David Gordon
In January 2020, David Gordon immersed himself with the Wooster Group, a historic experimental theater troupe in SoHo, attending forty rehearsals over six months.
“Costumes and props are recycled and patched together, with the feeling of a rainy day spent rummaging in the attic, but at times achieve a striking aesthetic complexity, like the lawn chair worn by Dafoe in The Emperor Jones, which he would occasionally unfold to sit down on. Most of Liz’s actors were, essentially, trained by her. (One day, I watch her and Kate spend an hour working through a speech with Erin, word by word, breath by breath. It’s like a master class.) As Kate says, ‘Liz’s company is built by attraction, not solicitation.’ The people who belong here find their way. Some stay for one piece, some for decades. Almost all of them see it as a defining experience in their artistic evolution.”
