Where’s the Wit in Miller’s Latest?

MINNEAPOLIS--In a 1999 lecture titled “ ‘The Crucible’ in History,” Arthur Miller acknowledged his reputation for dramatic anguish enacted on the moral high ground, a patch of land dotted by furrowed brows and righteously clenched teeth. “I have often wished I’d had the temperament to have done an absurd comedy,” he said of his Salem witch-hunt drama, “since that is what the situation often deserved.”

But temperaments change, either with or against the times. Not long after the lecture, Miller began writing “Resurrection Blues,” a satire--mournful and odd--set in a Latin American dictatorship, where a crucifixion is being arranged for worldwide television coverage.

It is a magical-realist polemic, a stylistic change-up from America’s preeminent dramatist, now 86 and still out there, pitching to an audience, when others approaching his stature would’ve hit the showers long ago.

“Out there,” in this instance, is a long way from New York City. Miller and director David Esbjornson deemed the script too large and, perhaps, too wobbly for a New York premiere at the off-Broadway Signature Theater, with which Miller has a relationship. So the world premiere has landed at the Guthrie Theater; Signature artistic director James Houghton also serves as Guthrie artistic adviser. Also, recent Guthrie stagings of Miller plays both early (“All My Sons”) and late (“Mr. Peters’ Connections”) helped pave the way for this world premiere.

While at odds with the prevailing theatrical image of Miller, “Resurrection Blues” relates directly to the writer’s satiric essays (collected in the recent and excellent “Echoes Down the Corridor”), in which Miller proffered modest proposals for televising executions held in Shea Stadium, or privatizing Congress. Indeed, in 2002, which will not enter history’s ledger as a good year for civil liberties, Miller’s 1954 essay advocating the punishment of America’s “conceptual traitors” has a grimly urgent ring to it.

“Resurrection Blues,” strangely, has less of one, though its best passages are livelier than anything Miller has written for the stage in decades.

Gen. Felix Barriaux (John Bedford Lloyd), suffering from impotence and a muffled crisis of conscience, oversees his cozy Latin American dictatorship, hungry for foreign investment, in between jetting off to Miami for dental work. The guerrilla forces in the hills have been quelled at the moment, though a mysterious messiahlike revolutionary has become a hero to the masses.

The general has decided to execute the Messiah, which appalls the general’s wealthy liberal cousin, Henri Schultz (Jeff Weiss), late-blooming academic and heir to a drug-company fortune. Through the guilt-ridden Henri comes an offer to the general from an American advertising agency: $25 million in exchange for exclusive rights to televise the crucifixion, complete with high-priced commercial air time.

For narrative convenience’s sake, if not for that of plausibility, “Resurrection Blues” brings TV commercial producer Emily Shapiro (Laila Robins) and her crew to the site of the crucifixion, unaware of what they’re in for. A Faustian weasel of an account executive, Skip L. Cheeseboro (David Chandler), urges Emily to swallow her scruples and fulfill her assignment. But the Messiah escapes. One of his cultlike disciples (Bruce Bohne), interrogated by the general, relays that the savior isn’t sure if he wants to cooperate with the general’s plan.

“Why?” asks the general. “If he’s the son of God, crucifixion shouldn’t bother him too much.”

“Yeah,” replies the disciple, “but if it turns out he’s not the son of God it’ll bother him a lot.”

Up against this banter, “Resurrection Blues” goes in for dead-serious, often static discussions of economic injustice and corroded values. (The railing against commercialism feels rather remote; Miller may not, in fact, realize how miserably derisive our TV-led popular culture has become.) In Henri’s reconciliation with his revolutionary daughter, Jeanine (Wendy Vanden Heuvel), the play delivers earnest scenes straight out of Ariel Dorfman’s “Widows.” There is, however, a startling line in one of them: At one point Jeanine, who attended Barnard College, says to Emily, “I hear they finally believe in death in Manhattan, is that true?” It’s all the more startling given Miller claims to have written it well before Sept. 11.

The tonal contradictions are willful, sometimes intriguing, often half-baked. You sense Miller allowing himself the luxury of loosening up; you sense also the attendant uncertainty. When it works, “Resurrection Blues” has a comic tang reminiscent of Graham Greene’s entertainments. When it doesn’t, Miller lets the audience get way, way out ahead of the narrative and restlessness sets in.

The Guthrie premiere doesn’t help these tonal contradictions. Director Esbjornson delivers the material well enough, but there’s no little sense of a specific playing style at work. It’s all rather stodgy and measured, which plays into Miller’s polemical side as opposed to his antic side. One misses a sense of propulsive satiric brio in the pacing; of the cast, only Lloyd’s wittily snappish general and Bohne’s stoner-disciple--first-rate performances--locate a performance universe that makes sense.

The play’s title carries a double meaning: By now, Miller’s older, established plays--”All My Sons,” “Death of a Salesman,” “The Crucible,” “The Price”--have been resurrected so often, the author may be feeling a little blue about it. There’s something in becoming a legend, the recipient of revivals galore and accolades unlimited, that is heartening and a little sad. “Resurrection Blues” inspires similar mixed feelings.

And yet, here is Miller’s latest full-length play, receiving its premiere 48 years after Miller’s first Broadway effort, “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” confounded wartime audiences more attuned to flag-waving sincerity. “Resurrection Blues” doesn’t really hang together, but there’s a touching quality to its best, mordantly funny debates. In the end, according to Henri--who, as played by Weiss, resembles Miller --”one must learn to live in the garden of one’s self.” A seductive notion. But even when he’s struggling with a new genre, Miller is artist enough to remind himself--and us--of the political costs of rugged individualism.

“Resurrection Blues” is at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, through Sept. 8. Information: (612) 377-2224 or www.guthrietheater.org.

Michael Phillips is the theater critic for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.