CRITICS SNIPE AT MILLER 1-ACTS

Arthur Miller’s early plays stay in circulation (“All My Sons” has just opened at the Ford’s Theater in Washington), but his later ones haven’t had much luck with the critics. Certainly that’s the case with “Danger: Memory,” two new Miller one-acts at Lincoln Center.

Each was written for two players, each concerns a person who is having trouble bringing something to mind. In “Clara” it’s a father who can’t call up the name of the man who may have murdered his daughter. In “I Can’t Remember Anything,” it’s a widow whose past seems to her a blur.

The New York critics praised the actors in each play--Kenneth McMillan and James Tolkan in “Clara,” Geraldine Fitzgerald and Mason Adams in “I Can’t Remember Anything”--but felt that Miller hadn’t given them enough to work with.

Or too much. The New York Times’ Frank Rich felt that “Clara” suffered from overexplication. “Sooner or later,” Rich wrote, “someone will say what everything means, and maybe more than once.” The other play, for Rich, failed “to deepen our knowledge of its characters.”

Marilyn Stasio of the New York Post thought that neither play “has been filled in with characters or ideas of sufficient substance. . . . The people and the issues are only partially filled in.” Stasio did seem to admire Gregory Mosher’s staging, although it struck her as somewhat “protective.”

Variety found McMillan’s performance as the stunned father “shatteringly good,” but not sufficiently supported by the text. As for the other play, it was “a trifling, oblique item that quite lacks Miller’s customary forcefulness.”

Gordon Rogoff in the Village Voice really pounced, criticizing Miller for an old fault--focusing on “Big Ideas” rather than on getting the facts of his stories right. For Rogoff, Miller has apparently been a “careless” playwright all along. “Am I alone,” he writes, “in wanting to know what Willy Loman sells?”

Yes.