劇作家のアーサー・ミラー氏死去。
劇作家のアーサー・ミラー氏死去。８９才。まだ生きていると思わなかったので少し驚いた。代表作は「セールスマンの死」だが、モンローと結婚した人として日本では知られているかもしれない。モンローの最後の作品「荒馬と女」の脚本も書いている。１９４９年、３３才で「セールスマンの死」を書いて脚光を浴びてから、以降、これ以上のものが書けず、「過去の人」として半世紀を生きて来た人のような気がする。生涯１７本の芝居を残し、代表作は、他に「The Crucible」（１９５３）など。他に小説も発表している。舞台に対しては複雑な思い入れがあるようで、１９８７年のインタビューで、いかに自分の人生を劇場でムダにしたか語っている。舞台を作るというのは、本当に面倒くさいプロセスなわけで、小説を書くように、仕上げたら編集者に渡して終わり、というわけにはいかない。俳優をキャストして、スケジュールを調整して、オープンしたら、批評家のレビューにも耐えないといけない。彼は批評家やレビューに対してもかなりビターな思いがあるよう。彼は芝居を書くというのは最も大変な仕事だと言う。それでも彼は、やはり死後、自分は作家でなく、「戯曲家」として覚えておいて欲しいと語っている。モンローの伝記を読んだ上での印象は、インテリで冷たい人、精神的に一番不安定な時期のモンローを捨てた人、という印象が強い。４年間の不安定な結婚生活の後、離婚、その後一年で彼は再婚し、その四ヶ月後にモンローは死体で発見される。１９６４年、彼は彼女との混乱した結婚生活を暴露するような芝居「After the Fall」を発表し、世間から、モンローのイメージを傷つける元亭主の裏切り行為と見られ、バッシングを受ける。 Arthur Miller, Legendary American Playwright, Is DeadBy MARILYN BERGER Published: February 11, 2005 Arthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 89. The cause was congestive heart failure, said Julia Bolus, his assistant.The author of "Death of a Salesman," a landmark of 20th-century drama, Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays. They often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life, including his brief and rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his staunch refusal to cooperate with the red-baiting House Committee on Un-American Activities."Death of a Salesman," which opened on Broadway in 1949, established Mr. Miller as a giant of the American theater when he was only 33 years old. It won the triple crown of theatrical artistry that year: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony Award.But the play's enormous success also overshadowed Mr. Miller's long career. Although "The Crucible," a 1953 play about the Salem witch trials inspired by his virulent hatred of McCarthyism, and "A View From the Bridge," a 1955 drama of obsession and betrayal, would ultimately take their place as popular classics of the international stage, Mr. Miller's later plays never equaled his early successes. Although he wrote a total of 17 plays, "The Price," produced on Broadway during the 1967-68 season, was his last solid critical and commercial hit.Nevertheless, Mr. Miller wrote successfully in a wide variety of other media. Perhaps most notably, he supplied the screenplay for "The Misfits," a 1961 movie directed by John Huston and starring Monroe, to whom he was married at the time. He also wrote essays, short stories and a 1987 autobiography, "Timebends: A Life." His writing remained politically engaged until the end of his life. But his reputation rests on a handful of his best-known plays, the dramas of guilt and betrayal and redemption that continue to be revived frequently at theaters all over the world. These dramas of social conscience were drawn from life and informed by the Great Depression, the event that he believed had had a more profound impact on the nation than any other in American history, except possibly the Civil War."In play after play," the drama critic Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times, "he holds man responsible for his and for his neighbor's actions." Elia Kazan, who directed "All My Sons," "Death of a Salesman" and "After the Fall," recalled that "in the 30's and 40's, we came out of the Group Theater tradition that every play should teach a lesson and make a thematic point.""Arthur organized his plays so that they came to a thematic climax," Kazan said. "He urged you to accept the thematic point."The Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who worked frequently with Mr. Miller, found a "rabbinical righteousness" in the playwright. "In his work, there is almost a conscious need to be a light onto the world. ... He spent his life seeking answers to what he saw around him as a world of injustice." Mr. Miller, a lanky, wiry man whose dark hair turned to gray in his later years, retained the appearance of a 1930's intellectual whether wearing work boots and blue jeans while fixing his back porch or seated behind his word processor or typewriter when the power failed at his 350-acre farm in Litchfield County.Writing plays was for him, he once said, like breathing. He wrote in "Timebends" that when he was young, he "imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do."He also saw playwriting as a way to change America, and, as he put it, "that meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck." He had known hard work firsthand in an automobile-parts warehouse during the Depression; in what he called a mouse house, where he earned $15 a month feeding mice used in medical experiments; and on the night shift in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. But Mr. Miller called playwriting the hardest work of all. "You know," he said, "a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to take a whack, and he's got to swallow bicycles and digest them." What Mr. Miller could not swallow was critics. During a 1987 interview, he dismissed them as "people who can't sing or dance." It was a reprise on a bitter theme he had sounded throughout his working life. "I'm a fatalist," he said. "I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is, and through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding."Mr. Miller once said, "I never had a critic in my corner in this country," and said he never saved the reviews of his plays, even the raves."There's an instinct in me that I had to exist apart from them, lest I rely on them for my esteem or despair," he said. "I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything."Mr. Miller's antipathy was understandable. At one moment he was hailed as the greatest living playwright, and at another as a has-been whose greatest successes were decades behind him. Even at the height of his success, Mr. Miller's work received harsh criticism from some prominent critics. Eric Bentley, the drama critic for The New Republic in the 1950's, dismissed "The Crucible" writing, "The world has made this author important before he has made himself great."Mr. Miller also despaired of the American theater, which he believed was too profit-oriented to allow writers and actors to flourish. He noted that opera and ballet in America were supported through contributions, but that what he called the "brutal inanity" of Broadway required that the American theater pay for itself. After his autobiography was published in 1987, he reflected in an interview on the course he had taken in life. "It has gone through my mind how much time I wasted in the theater, if only because when you write a book you pack it up and send it off," he said. "In the theater, you spend months casting actors who are busy in the movies anyway and then to get struck down in half an hour, as has happened to me more than once ... You have to say to yourself: 'Why do it? It's almost insulting.'" But when asked how he wanted to be remembered, he did not hesitate. "I hope as a playwright," he said. "That would be all of it."
出産・子育て
ファッション
美容・コスメ
健康・ダイエット
生活・インテリア
料理・食べ物
ドリンク・お酒
ペット
趣味・ゲーム
映画・ＴＶ
音楽
読書・コミック
旅行・海外情報
園芸
スポーツ
アウトドア・釣り
車・バイク
パソコン・家電
そのほか
すべてのジャンル
