Miller’s Crossing : Playwright Opens His Newest Work Way Off Broadway

The world premiere of Arthur Miller’s first full-length play in more than a decade would automatically be a big event. But Miller’s decision to open his new play “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” in a West End theater has created an especially intense level of excitement among theatergoers here.

“The Ride Down Mount Morgan” opened at Wyndham’s Theatre Thursday to reviews that have ranged from adulatory to dismissive. But the presence here of the man who wrote “Death of a Salesman,” “The Crucible” and “All My Sons” and the attention surrounding his new work contributed to a busy weekend at the Wyndham’s box office. Miller, 76, has been rewarded for his London gamble; he has a hit on his hands.

In the last few days, Miller has been explaining his reasons for not opening “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” on Broadway. “Such a play would cost three times as much in New York as in London--and it’s not cheap in London,” he told the Times of London. “When you have that kind of money riding on it, everyone’s nerves are on edge and it’s no climate in which to work effectively.”

Miller also believes that the cost of Broadway tickets are “out of sight as far as a lot of people are concerned. Schoolteachers, young intellectuals and so on are simply outpriced. In fact, I would say that two-thirds of the conceivable audiences cannot afford to go.”

During his visit, Miller has told confidants that he likes the idea of “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” opening here in company with new plays by David Hare, Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter. Privately, he laments the scarcity of new plays on Broadway--and relished the prospect of opening his play in a city where its fate does not hang on the reaction of a single all-powerful theater critic. Then there is the factor that Miller is genuinely revered here; 10 of his plays have been successfully revived on the London stage since 1980.

Ironically, a revival of “The Crucible,” the most widely seen work in Miller’s canon, is currently enjoying an eight-week run on Broadway with Martin Sheen and Michael York. The playwright believes that prevailing conditions in New York favor a revival of his 38-year-old classic play rather than his new work.

“The Ride Down Mount Morgan,” on which he has been working intermittently for 10 years, is about the life, rather than the death of a salesman. It differs from much of Miller’s work in that it is not overtly political and because much of it elicits loud laughter from audiences. Indeed, its premise is rooted in farce: A wealthy, bigamous New Yorker named Lyman Felt, who has built up a large insurance company, ends up in the hospital after his Porsche leaves a mountain road. Both his wives, the first an imperious WASP, the second a Jewish sensualist, are summoned to the hospital; the first wife is unaware he has married again, and the second does not know he never divorced.

From this point, Miller has undertaken to explore what he has called “the biology of morals.” “Morality isn’t an idea of ours,” he told the London Times. “I’m asking what underlies it. It’s something written into our programming.”

In the play’s most quoted passage, Felt tells his attorney: “Look, we’re all the same. A man is a 14-room house. In the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living room he’s rolling around with some . . . girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up.”

Felt’s second marriage also covers the Reagan-Bush decade, of which the entire play becomes a critique. Observers have suggested that while “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” is not autobiographical, the initial impact of meeting Marilyn Monroe on Miller’s first marriage to his college sweetheart helped form the experience that made him write it. Miller has agreed without disclosing more.

The London Sunday Times called the play “searching, scorching, harsh but compassionate . . . an act of both retribution and pity.” The Guardian’s Michael Billington complained: “I kept hungering for a narrative dynamism to support Miller’s undeniable moral fervor and horror at the tyranny of self.” The play was warmly endorsed by “The Late Show,” the influential BBC TV arts program, but the Independent’s theater critic, Irving Wardle, worried that Miller might be coasting on his reputation. Reactions were equally mixed toward the performance of British actor Tom Conti as Felt.

Miller left London on Sunday for Stockholm, where he will direct a new production of “Death of a Salesman.” “If I can do it in Chinese (which he did in Beijing in 1983), I can do it in Swedish,” he joked to reporters last week.

He will then return home to Connecticut to start preparing for a film of “The Crucible.” He has written a screenplay from his own drama for 20th Century Fox. Miller’s experiences as a screenwriter have not been happy. He disliked “The Misfits,” which he wrote for Monroe, and loathed “Everybody Wins,” his 1990 film starring Debra Winger.

“I think ‘The Crucible’ could be a great movie, and this time, I’m cautiously hopeful they won’t mess with the script,” he told Zoe Heller of the Independent. “It’s based on what they call ‘a classic play,’ so they’re not going to fool around too much.”

For all this, he enjoys films, and contrasts them to the future of theater in general: “It isn’t clear at all whether in its present form (theater) is going to hang around--for the simple reason that the movies are more attractive.”