COVER STORY : The Arthur Miller Method : The playwright’s first Broadway success was almost 50 years ago. But America’s greatest living playwright keeps writing <i> real</i> plays. He also worries. What’s he worried about? Read on. . . .

Arthur Miller stands in the doorway of the Southbury bus depot, waiting for the 10:45 to arrive--late, as usual--and keeping an eye peeled for the interviewer he has volunteered to fetch.

The visor on his cap masks his face, but at more than six feet, he’s still hard to miss. Craggily handsome at 78, the man who is arguably America’s most famous living playwright may look a bit imperious, but his manner is anything but.

Driving through the verdant hills and two-barn towns of rural Connecticut, he plays the tour guide. In a gravelly voice summoned from the vast deep of a Brooklyn youth, Miller explains everything from local flora to the region’s desiccated defense industry. More avuncular than pedantic, he’s got the deadpan of a master kibitzer down cold.

He likes to ask questions too, listening intently when talk turns to the California economy. Miller has, after all, long been interested in how the average Joe gets by. As Lillian Hellman could not and would “not cut (her) conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” Arthur Miller has not abandoned the dramatic realism and socially and ethically charged concerns that he first brought to Broadway 50 years ago.

But it hasn’t been an easy five decades. “Broken Glass,” Miller’s first Broadway outing in 14 years, received mostly positive reviews and a Tony nomination for best play. Still, the production, which just opened in April, will close next Sunday. Serious plays, it seems, hardly ever last on Broadway these days.

Tony Kushner’s “Perestroika,” which won this year’s best play Tony, is the only new drama on Broadway that’s been able to survive this season.

The year began with the almost-instant closing of “Wonderful Tennessee,” a work by Ireland’s distinguished dramatist Brian Friel. Similarly, both Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle” and Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992”--both of also nominated for the best play Tony--lasted for fewer performances than “Broken Glass.”

However, “Broken Glass” has a new life ahead. It went into rehearsal Monday at London’s National Theatre, and a Paris production is also in the offing. Indeed, Miller’s work is as popular as ever, with shows running in at least five countries besides the United States this year alone.

Attention is also being paid on other fronts. Kenneth Branagh is scheduled to direct and star in Miller’s own screenplay of “The Crucible,” and Pulitzer-winning composer William Bolcom is making an opera of “A View From the Bridge.”

Abroad, he is considered America’s greatest living playwright. Arthur Miller is, beyond dispute, the most senior of the country’s actively working serious dramatists. Yet not since “Death of a Salesman” has he received the recognition in America that he inspires abroad. After years of mostly Off Broadway productions and unenthusiastic response here, “Broken Glass” marked a comeback of sorts, albeit a bitter one given the short run.

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Although Miller didn’t set out with a topical agenda, “Broken Glass” is timely. Set in 1938 Brooklyn, it raises contemporary issues of ethnic separatism and anti-Semitism. “I’ve probably been influenced in selecting the theme by the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in this world, which is something that I wouldn’t have believed,” Miller says. “It always comes as a surprise, whenever it happens. It’s ‘Well, that’s over with; it’s not going to happen anymore,’ and suddenly, there it is again.”

Miller has spent a career dissecting public and private morality. In fact, he has more than once been called an American Ibsen, including, most recently, by the New York Times’ David Richards.

But that’s not the stuff of which boffo box office is made these days.

“It’s a comment on the theater,” said Robert Whitehead, a co-producer of “Broken Glass” and a 40-year veteran of Broadway, speaking on the day it was announced that the play would close. “A play of this depth has a tough time right now. It has to do with the kind of taste that has been generated by an endless mass of television: It’s Las Vegas time. But Arthur Miller’s position is there forever.”

Asked to comment on the announced closing, Miller expressed a grim view of Broadway: “ ‘Broken Glass’ must close after some 10 weeks in New York because the costs of running are greater than the receipts. This despite many sellouts.

“End of ‘Broken Glass’? Not at all. It is in rehearsal at the Royal National Theatre, London. It will be done in the fall in Paris at the Theatre Marigny, and in Munich and other German cities next winter.

“Some plays fail because they are failures. This play, as a play, is precisely what I wanted it to be and is beautifully performed. Its audiences, I dare say, have been spellbound.

“The conditions of non-musical theater production in New York are what have failed, not ‘Broken Glass.’ In a city of so many millions, mine was the only straight play to have been initiated on Broadway. We used to have a crisis; we are now post-crisis, in catastrophe.

“At the Tony Awards ceremony, a sad self-congratulatory farce, it was proudly announced that Broadway shows took in more money than ever last year. This is theater as a form of banking. No doubt if they continue raising ticket prices, they will take in even more money next year--but it’s not even true; they didn’t mention that the total take included shows on the road, not just Broadway.

“If people want symphony orchestras, ballet, opera, they have to subsidize productions. We will not subsidize serious theater. We insist on theater-for-profit. And that is the theater we have. There’s only one problem: Where is it?”

Whitehead agrees that more than art, the story of Broadway success is of pure economics. “There is a confluence of reasons that make it difficult for any serious piece of work,” he said. “If we could live with the price of a ticket that was between $25 and $30, you could go on forever. It’s just that you can’t run a show on that basis with the overhead the way it is, particularly as you look into July, when business is always rotten.”

But that doesn’t mean Miller isn’t held in high esteem, especially by those in the theater. Indeed, he’s a writer who inspires lofty comparisons. “It makes me nervous when people question the relevance of great writers, whether they’re living, like Arthur Miller, or dead, like Shakespeare,” says Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien, who directed Miller’s “All My Sons” and his adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” for PBS’ “American Playhouse.”

O’Brien says that both Shakespeare and Miller “are extremely moral men who value language and who display their sense of humor in unexpected ways. (Miller) speaks to something basic and true in us, and we respond.”

But familiarity may breed, if not contempt, then comparative neglect. “It’s so easy for the well- and ill-intended to dismiss Arthur because he has lasted so long,” continues O’Brien, who directed this year’s Tony-nominated revival of “Damn Yankees.” “We think, ‘Oh, we can’t possibly be dealing with those questions again.’ But, yes, we are.”

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As Miller steers his oldish gray sedan up the driveway of his homestead, Sebastian, a neighbor dog who likes to hang out there, is lying in the middle of the garage floor. Miller stops, waiting patiently for the pooch to clear out, and then pulls in.

Through the garage door, beyond the spacious green lawn, are two small studios where Miller and his wife of 32 years, photographer Inge Morath, work.

Arthur Miller wears khakis and tennies with a light blue cotton shirt. He sits on lived-in patio furniture near the house he’s called home since 1956 and talks about how topical his latest play has turned out to be. “I didn’t realize that the Holocaust was going to be such the issue, with ‘Schindler’s List’ and the museum in Washington and so forth,” he says. “That wasn’t really the center of my concentration. It was, rather, the mystery of how this social-political dilemma lodged in this woman’s limbs, so to speak, reaching across 3,000 miles of water.”

“Broken Glass,” which features Amy Irving, Ron Rifkin and David Dukes and is directed by John Tillinger, is about a Jewish woman who, upon reading of the rising anti-Semitic violence in Europe, develops a hysterical paralysis in her legs. Neither her uptight husband (Rifkin) nor a charming neighborhood doctor (Dukes) are able to bring her out of it.

Miller’s title suggests the shards of a domestic spat--the kind that the husband and wife, who have been sexually estranged for years, may have had. But it also refers to Germany’s Kristallnacht, the 1938 night of rioting in which the Nazis went on a rampage, shattering the windows of and setting fire to Jewish shops and synagogues.

The years 1937 and 1938 stand out in the playwright’s memory. “1937 was the year I bought a radio from a friend of mine,” recalls Miller, who was a student at the University of Michigan at the time. “By sheer accident, I turned it on one evening and got Europe. I heard this screaming, and I knew enough German to understand vaguely what it was. It was Hitler. The Germans were broadcasting the speech worldwide, and it was hysteria. It sounded like a crazy person. That was the year before this play takes place.”

Miller graduated in 1938, and the following November came Kristallnacht. “It was, historically, the hour when this whole thing exploded with the first incredible viciousness,” he says. “There’d always been anti-Semitism in Europe--everybody knew that. But the Kristallnacht was the first dramatic thing that people were aware of, that told them this was not the old ballgame, that this was something new and incredible.

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Sylvia Gellburg, the protagonist in “Broken Glass,” reads about these horrors and suddenly finds her legs paralyzed. From her wheelchair, she mixes her anger at what’s going on in Europe with her own private anguish.

“What I did with my life!” she cries out to her husband in that signature Miller-esque mix of Brooklyn idiom and heightened prose familiar to anyone who’s ever seen “Death of a Salesman.” “Out of ignorance. Out of not wanting to shame you in front of other people. A whole life. Gave it away like a couple of pennies. I took better care of my shoes.”

It’s a voice, a milieu, that Miller’s always carried with him. Born in 1915 in Harlem, he grew up in a middle-class Jewish family that was financially devastated by the Depression.

He worked in a warehouse for two years to scrape together college tuition and at the University of Michigan found his calling as a playwright.

Miller’s war diary “Situation Normal” was published in 1944, the same year he had his first production in a professional theater--”The Man Who Had All the Luck”--which ran only four performances. In 1945 his first (and only) novel, “Focus,” came out, and in 1947 came “All My Sons,” his first critical success.

He’s also written a few screenplays and various other works, yet is unequivocally most famous for his plays. The most notable of these--”Death of a Salesman,” “The Crucible,” “A View From the Bridge,” “After the Fall”--are considered classics, and others hover near that category.

Miller is also remembered for standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, refusing to name names, and for his brief marriage to Marilyn Monroe.

He was first married from 1940-56, to Mary Slattery, then from 1956-60 to Monroe, and in 1962 to Morath. He has a son and a daughter by his first marriage and a daughter with Morath. He and Morath have collaborated on a number of photography books, and his 1987 autobiography, “Timebends,” is dedicated to her.

Above all, Miller has always been known as a man of the theater, although it’s become a harder road to hoe since the 1950s. He is one of the few artists with a five-decade overview of Broadway’s rise and fall. “I think there was a shift in the mid or late ‘50s,” Miller says. “Some part of the population moved out of New York, into the suburbs. That solid middle class that was the audience of the theater in New York got dispersed.”

But the decline of Manhattan theater was not just a matter of demographics. The nature of the theater and plays also changed, he says. “They got to be more and more special. The abstract theater moved in. It’s a terrifically interesting theater, but not for the mass of people. They felt left out. They figured it wasn’t for them anymore, and they went to the movies, where they still got stories, characters and situations they were familiar with.”

Although the atmosphere for theater in this country has never been very accommodating, it was once better than it is now. “We had a mythology that theater was about prominent values of some kind and show business was something else,” says Miller. “Theater didn’t run as long as show business normally. However, everybody assumed that the theater was about matters that had to do with the spirit and there was room for that--small room, but there was room.”

That there is almost no more such room is, according to Miller, simply the byproduct of capitalism. “There are virtues to this system, but one of them is not the arts,” he says. “At the same time, we create more of contemporary art in every field than anybody else. We’ve got an immense population, and, just by the law of averages, you get a lot done.”

When it comes to the theater, the lasting literature has been a relatively populist one. “Our theater is probably the most popular: Williams, Albee, I and a few others have tried to do serious work, but it’s been work that was aimed at the big audience because it’s a democratic country,” Miller says. “It wasn’t aimed at a small clique. There are playwrights who write for a small clique, but they don’t travel much.”

Now, though, that big audience has become much harder for the stage to reach, and revivals are the order of the day. “For a New York producer to take an unknown writer and back him, the financial gamble is tremendous,” says Miller. “So they go for the time-tested stuff.”

There hasn’t been much room in Miller’s own country for his kind of drama in recent years--although he has continued to have success in England and elsewhere. The only time he’s been on Broadway in the past couple of decades was with 1980’s “The American Clock,” which lasted only 12 performances. In London, however, the same play was nominated for the Olivier award for best play.

Miller’s 1987 Lincoln Center one-acts, “Danger/Memory!,” were not well-liked here either. And 1993’s “The Last Yankee” was given a tepid reception when it opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club, although it went on to an eight-month run in London’s West End.

He also blames, as he writes in “Timebends,” that “lethal New York combination of a single all-powerful newspaper and a visionless if not irresponsible theater management, some sectors of which had, yes, profiteered to the point where the whole theatrical enterprise was gasping and near death. . . .”

Other problems include getting well-trained actors who are willing to work hard for relatively little pay. “It’s hard for us to cast plays,” Miller says. “There’s no money in it comparatively. I know one guy on a television show--last week he had six lines for that show, and he gets $40,000 a week. Well, there’s no way to do that in theater. There’s a few of them who are just crazy about acting in the theater, but there are not many.”

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A nattily dressed Stanley Kauffmann, the former New York Times theater critic and, since 1958, film critic for the New Republic, sits in the Booth Theatre on a warm May afternoon, taking in a matinee performance of the latest work by a writer who is exactly his own age: 78. This does not happen often.

Kauffmann calls Miller “a vigorous man who’s very interested in the world, a compassionate, humane man. How many playwrights in the world are there who, while still alive, enter into world repertory as he has? That’s inarguable.”

Yet Kauffmann also has reservations. “At the same time, he’s genuine and undisturbing, like an ad for Common Cause,” he says. “He’s a good, sound old-fashioned, traditional moralist--which is not something to scoff at, but neither is it exciting in art. He’s really a middle-class homilist.”

Kauffmann’s opinions--which are echoed in the respectful yet qualified praise Miller sometimes elicits from American critics--differ from the particularly high regard with which the playwright is held in England. Miller regularly travels there to see productions of his plays, and he holds the British system in great esteem.

One key difference between American and British theater is that the latter receives government money. “The main thing about British theater is that they have these four or five subsidized theaters in London,” Miller says. “Since the deficits are made up by the government, they can afford to experiment more.

“They can still play something twice a week to a half-empty house because somebody believes that it’s valuable. It makes the difference between feeling that you’re in a world of art or a world of business.”

Miller will travel to London in July for the Aug. 5 opening of “Broken Glass.” “I have to agree, which I’m delighted to do, to meet that audience in the Olivier Theatre, which is immense, for two hours,” says Miller. “And they’ll come and ask questions. The place will be packed.

“I could do it a whole week if I wanted to, and I’m not alone in this,” Miller continues. “The authors usually do that, and they keep a relationship going with that audience. There’s a communal feeling about the whole thing. They haven’t lost the theater culture there yet. I attribute it to the subsidized theaters.”

Miller also enjoys the ways in which his plays have been received in other countries. “Everybody thinks, ‘How could they understand “Death of a Salesman” in China?’ ” says Miller. “But everybody forgets that the Chinese invented business, about 6,000 years ago, and that the communist era is much less of the history of that society.”

In 1983, Miller directed “Death of a Salesman” in Beijing. “Bill Moyers did a piece about the play in China,” he recalls. “They interviewed a young man coming out of the theater, and he said: ‘Oh, that Willy Loman, he’s right. Everybody wants to be No. 1. That Biff, he’s all wrong.’

“Biff represented to him the very serious, rather boring, socially responsible guy. Willy represented the future, because they were smelling the scent of capitalism. It never dawned on me that of course they would see him as the hero who was misunderstood by everybody, including his family.”

In 1991, Miller directed the same play in Stockholm. “We used to think this (the expendability of workers, and salesmen) was an American problem, because Swedes have had a kind of quasi-socialism where you had a lot of security and Willy’s getting fired wouldn’t happen,” he says. “This was the mythology. I never believed it. And now all that insecurity is there. They caught up with us.”

Kauffmann, who recalls first seeing actor Marcello Mastroianni in a 1956 production of “Death of a Salesman” in Rome directed by filmmaker Luchino Visconti, thinks the appeal may be on a more personal level. “You never saw Brooklyn look like that in your life,” jokes Kauffmann about the staging. “But there was something about the father-son struggle--a recurrent theme--that meant a great deal to them. They take (Miller) abroad as a voice of a certain period in American life and history.”

That voice will continue to be heard in theaters around the world, as well as in small theaters across this country--and perhaps even on Broadway again, although the climate looks as though it will remain hostile. And Miller will continue to write and work in the theater.

In addition to his impending trip to London for the National’s staging of “Broken Glass,” Miller is also writing these days.

“I’m working on something,” he says. “I don’t know whether it’s going to be fiction or a play. It’ll take me a while to find out.”

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Miller steers his steel-colored sedan back into the parking lot of the Southbury bus station. He puts the car in park and insists, despite his visitor’s protests, on going inside to make sure that there really is a 12:35 bus going out.

“We’re going to check, so we don’t leave you here to rot,” he says while striding into the comfortably bourgeoise depot, revealing a trace of the Jewish mother that lurks in so many Jewish fathers. He then asks a clerk not once, but twice, about the bus. Just to make sure.

Miller is, after all, a caretaker--at once of his guests and of a vision of the American theater as a forum for the public conscience. He is also a precursor to much younger playwrights like Tony Kushner of “Angels in America” fame, whose works are driven by moral imperatives.

Yet as the younger generation of politically driven theater writers, few though they may be, increasingly are lured toward film, the culture of serious drama remains in jeopardy. And Arthur Miller may well be the last of a breed.

“He came in at just the right time,” says Kauffmann. “His seemed to me at the time to be the best of the flood of plays that were of that strident temper that had come along since the Depression. There isn’t that kind of belief now. There isn’t that kind of faith in the future now--an achievable, perfectable future.”