CANDLE AND THE WINDBAG :

It's Gloves-Off Time for an Angry Arthur Miller : Arthur Miller has always held America to a higher moral standard than it has ever achieved. So perhaps it's no surprise that with his new play, "Resurrection Blues," he's getting fed up at last. (Bruce Weber, 8/15/02, NY Times)

Arthur Miller has always held America, hopefully and critically, to a higher moral standard than it has ever achieved. So perhaps it's no surprise that now, at 86, he's getting fed up at last. His new play, "Resurrection Blues," which is having its premiere production through Sept. 8 at the Guthrie Theater here, is a bitter comedy about the world that the American century wrought, and it essentially says that we have bollixed things up so badly that a Messiah has no chance; God has fled. That the deity in the play (who may or may not represent the Second Coming) keeps changing his name--at one point it's Ralph, at another Frederico--allows Mr. Miller to save his most meaningful yuk for the end.

"Goodbye, Charlie," a chorus of characters says to him, gazing at the sky as they ostensibly witness his departure and fade from the stage themselves.

This is, actually, among the gentler and more resonant jokes in Mr. Miller's indignant and disappointingly unpersuasive work. Creeping into a number of unsatirical speeches is the playwright's plaintive unhappiness with the world he sees in the latter days of his life. As someone asks rhetorically, "Wouldn't you gladly resign from the human race if there was another one to belong to?"

It seems worth noting that the "higher moral standard" that Mr. Miller most wanted America to measure up to was Socialism and that had he and his fellow travellers had their way one of the things that we'd not have bollixed up in the 20th Century was the Soviet Union--which would still be around oppressing all of Eastern Europe. What the heck was Marilyn thinking?
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 15, 2002 8:40 AM