September 18-24, 2003

art

Attention Must Be Paid!

King arthur’s court: The Wilma plays host to the East Coast premiere of Arthur Miller’s latest play, Resurrection Blues. Photo By: Jim Roese Photography

Arthur Miller and the Wilma put on a comedy.

by Toby Zinman

Arthur Miller, King of Comedy. Yeah, right. Ditto Jiri Zizka. If ever two theater practitioners have made their names through Serious Moral and Political Outrage, it is these two men. But here comes a satire -- a funny, hip, laugh-out-loud satire -- written by Miller and directed by Zizka in its East Coast premiere. As Zizka told me, he connected to the script as soon as he read it: "I like satirical comedies, comedies with darkness. I like intensity and hilarity in the same neighborhood."

Resurrection Blues opened a year ago at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and the production was covered by the international press; and since Philly isn't London (the expected venue for Miller premieres), this counts as a major event both for the city and for regional theaters generally. Miller revised the script for the Wilma opening, and came to the auditions as well; he is, according to the director, "very perceptive, very generous, and actors sense that immediately."

At 87, Arthur Miller is unquestionably the Grand Old Man of American Drama. It is astonishing to realize that All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) were written more than half a century ago, full of fury and heartbreak that the American Dream had been so betrayed, that humankind was, finally, so self-interested and materialistic that we dishonor ourselves and destroy each other through greed. When Joe Keller (in AMS) knowingly ships damaged parts to the Air Force and ultimately kills 17 pilots in World War II because to not do it would have cost him his lucrative contract and his business, or when Willy Loman pleads with his callous young boss not to treat a man like a piece of fruit, to squeeze out all the juice and throw him out, Miller's indictment still resonates with power and relevance today. As it does in The Crucible and The Price -- all of these have had recent, brilliant revivals.

Those plays still move us. And Miller is still writing (I'm told there is another new play in the works). And he's still mad.

Miller's three most recent plays, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, Mr. Peters' Connections and Resurrection Blues, continue his passionate protest; this writer has never lost his rage and disgust. What he has lost, however, is his somber, sometimes preachy tone: These recent plays are, surprisingly, funny, and Resurrection Blues is marked by what Zizka calls "vigor and viciousness."

Resurrection Blues is set in a South American country, where 2 percent of the population owns 96 percent of the wealth, where drugs are the primary national product, guns are everywhere and the contaminated water destroys children ("After 38 years of civil war, what did you expect to find here, Sweden?"). Someone has appeared in the villages -- named Charley or Jack or whatever -- who seems to be the son of God. Felix, the strongman head of state, has captured him and plans to execute him by crucifixion. An American television network has offered a huge sum of money for the rights to broadcast the execution, complete with commercial breaks. This is the media run amok, off the chain, out of moral control; it's Wag the Dog meets Saint Joan, The Grand Inquisitor does Survivor.

This script was inspired partly by Miller's Swiftian essay in The New York Times, in which he modestly proposes public executions in Shea Stadium with an electric chair at second base, and partly by Miller's trip to Colombia, where a friend had to hide in a well from guerrillas for three days. The production's music will be South American, evocative of a locale defined in the script only as "a far-away country." As Zizka said, "It's like Brecht, who set his plays someplace else, but it's really always Germany."

Zizka describes the play's subject matter as "extremely appealing," commenting on how television creates and defines reality, and thus the dominant principle of the stage design will be frames that expand and contract: "What is inside the frame [in television or film] has been selected as truth, and what is outside doesn't exist."

In The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, the central character’s opening lines are part of a dream-state sales meeting: "Today I would like you to consider life insurance from a different perspective. I want you to look at the whole economic system as one enormous tit. So the job of the individual is to get a good place in line for a suck." This vision of the rapacious baby returns in Mr. Peters, in his mythic vision of the origins of the human race when the "defective" are flung out of paradise: "They were full of avarice and greed. And they broke into a thousand pieces and fell to Earth, and it is from their seed that we all descend. … If a baby had the strength, wouldn’t he knock you down to get to a tit? … We tolerate babies only because they are helpless, but the alpha and omega of their real nature is a five-letter word, g-r-e-e-d. The rest is gossip."

That five-letter word is still the dirtiest word Miller knows. As the film director asks in Resurrection Blues, "Wouldn’t you gladly resign from the human race if only there was another one to belong to?"

Resurrection Blues runs through Oct. 26, $9-$50, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 215-546-7824. Dramaturg Dr. Yahil-Wax will speak about "The Triumph of Immigrant Theatre" prior to the performance on Sept. 29, 5:30-7 p.m. Conversation with the Resurrection Blues artistic team, Oct. 15, 5:30-7 p.m., Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-545-4400.