Before and after the Fall1 (2014)

'The mind has no color but its memories are brilliant against the grayness of its landscape...People appear and disappear instantaneously, as in the mind...The effect, therefore, will be the surging, flitting, instantaneousness of a mind question over its own surfaces and into its depths (Miller, After the Fall 1)These are central images in the opening description of After the Fall, a play that reflects Arthur Miller's unceasing search for understanding and peace, and his artistic attempt to capture the stream-of-consciousness workings of the mind. Moments that occur years apart and have no seemingly logical connection are juxtaposed by memory, and just as Quentin is haunted by the people in his life and their poignant statements, so Miller revisited and re-examined specific events, people, and ideas that permeate his work, reflecting his pre-occupation and his intense lifetime desire to work them through to satisfaction.Written and produced at nearly the midpoint of Miller's sixty-eight-year career as a playwright, After the Fall is a pivotal play and, as such, serves as a useful prismatic lens through which to view his oeuvre and its dramatic structure, themes, characters, particular moments and lines, and his approaches to staging. Fifty years and nineteen plays after its premiere, After the Fall remains Miller's most challenging, problematic, and controversial play.Although Miller published his autobiography, Timebends, A Life, in 1987, he had, in essence, written his autobiography in dramatic form twenty-three years earlier. Both Fall and Timebends are stream-of-conscious explorations that reveal significant events in Miller's life; both also lapse, perhaps unwittingly, into extensive coverage of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe.Nine years had passed since Miller had had a new play produced, his longest hiatus from the theatre. However, during this absence, he made an enormous leap in dramatic form and staging. This was a period fraught with personal and professional struggles for the playwright: a divorce from his first wife; a marriage to, and divorce from, Marilyn Monroe; the deaths of his mother and Monroe; and a marriage to Ingeborg Morath, with whom he had his third and fourth children. There were serious legal battles over Miller's earlier interest in communism, resulting in a subpoena and contempt charge by HUAC, later reversed by the Court of Appeals, (Bigsby xvi) and the playwright was disturbed by director and theatrical collaborator Elia Kazan's testimony in which he named other attendees of Communist Party meetings in order to save his own film directing career, and by the firing and self-imposed isolation of his friend Louis Untermeyer (Miller, Timebends 333). However turbulent, these events, as well as other people in his life at the time, proved fertile ground for Miller and found their way into his play through a lengthy, circuitous, and, ultimately, unfinished process.For many of his thirty-eight unpublished, published, and produced plays, Miller's dramatic ideas stem from four sources: historical or current events, written works that he adapted or drew upon rather freely, stories he heard and mentally stored for years, and his personal history, frequently, his family's economic and social displacement during the Depression.For After the Fall, Miller mixed plot ideas from his own life with other major events of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust and World War II, as well as with Albert Camus' The Fall (La Chute), for which he was asked to write a screenplay in 1956. Camus' work includes the story of a man who, while walking along the Seine, hears the splash of a woman attempting to commit suicide. The murky water, his inability to swim, and his fear of getting pneumonia prevent him from attempting to save her. The story of La Chute must have echoed personally for Miller when he learned that his third wife, Ingeborg Morath, had been saved from jumping off a bridge by a stranger as she wandered through war-tom Europe at the end of Nazi occupation (Timebends 505). …