Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Arthur Miller: Revisionist commentary
Here's the concluding paragraph from a critic of the late playwrite:
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the fanfares to die away, and no less interesting to see whether any of Miller's plays outlive him. Most are already deservedly forgotten, but I expect that "Death of a Salesman" will continue to hold the stage, though not because it is beautiful or intelligent or provocative. It is, rather, sentimental, and sentimentality always goes over big in the commercial theater, so long as it's disguised as realism. More important, "Death of a Salesman" has a coarsely compulsive power that somehow manages to mask its aesthetic deficiencies, or at least render them momentarily palatable. That's the mystery of theater: It's all about what works, and like it or not, "Death of a Salesman" works. But it's no "Lear," just as Arthur Miller was no Shakespeare, and anyone who thinks otherwise is as lead-eared as he was.
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