[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 53 (Thursday, May 2, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3835-S3836]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  EARLY MILLER: BIRTH OF A PLAYWRIGHT

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I would like to commend to my colleagues 
an article from the New York Times reviewing a new production of Arthur 
Miller's play, ``The Man Who Had All the Luck.''
  Produced by the Williamstown Theater Festival last summer, this 
revival has earned acclaim for its extraordinary adaptation of this 
work by one of America's finest playwrights.
  The critic has offered special praise for the lead actors, Chris 
O'Donnell and Samantha Mathis as well as Sam Robards.
  The Williamstown Theater Festival is a tremendous organization which 
brings great drama to the Berkshires every summer, with some of the 
most talented performers and directors in the country. This production 
is now brilliantly staged on Broadway and I know that audiences will 
enjoy this timeless and poignant American story.
  I ask unanimous consent that the article from the New York Times be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 [From the New York Times, May 2, 2002]

                  Early Miller: Birth of a Playwright

                            (By Bruce Weber)

       Unthreateningly handsome, with cornfed brawn, a polite-to-
     old-ladies manner and an earnest bleat in the voice, the 
     young actor Chris O'Donnell certainly has the traditional 
     mien of the All-American boy. He's a natural for the lead 
     role in ``The Man Who Had All the Luck,'' Arthur Miller's 
     1940 play, subtitled ``A Fable,'' about America and the 
     burdens of unmitigated good fortune, which opened in a 
     stirring and rich revival last night on Broadway at the 
     American Airlines Theater. I mean, he's really a natural. 
     Known for playing sidekicks in popular films--he was Robin in 
     two of the ``Batman'' movies, and he starred with Al Pacino 
     in ``Scent of a Woman''--Mr. O'Donnell had never appeared 
     onstage before. ``The Man Who Had All the Luck'' was produced 
     last summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival.
       Mr. O'Donnell played the title character, David Beeves, a 
     young Midwesterner who, with seemingly unearned fate, gets 
     the girl, the business, the land and the legacy, while all of 
     those around him fall victim to life's vicissitudes and 
     suffer enormous disappointments. His performance then made it 
     clear that some gifts--like effortless charisma and

[[Page S3836]]

     physical certainty--do indeed descend on some people as if 
     ordained.
       And now, as he leads a splendid cast in a production 
     directed by Scott Ellis that the Roundabout Theater has 
     imported largely intact from Williamstown, Mr. O'Donnell 
     appears, if anything, more in control of a character who is 
     blessed (and cursed) with being preternaturally in control. 
     It's a remarkably complex and counterintuitive performance. 
     You can't be naive and play naivete so well; nor can you be 
     conscience stricken and play ambivalence with such 
     conviction.
       The play, written by Mr. Miller when he was 25, was his 
     first to appear on Broadway, where, in 1944, it closed after 
     four performances. And from the current production you can 
     understand why producers would take a chance on a youthful 
     playwright and why audiences and critics were not so eager 
     to join them. It is a serious, ambitious work by a 
     precocious and perhaps over-reaching young writer, 
     populated by characters with blunt purpose; a little slow 
     moving, particularly in the opening act; and a little 
     pedantic, particularly in the third (and closing) act. 
     Reviewing the original production in The New York Times, 
     Lewis Nichols said, with a yawn: `` `The Man Who Had All 
     the Luck' lacks either the final care or the luck to make 
     it a good play. But it has tried, and that is something.''
       What no one could have known of course is what Mr. Miller 
     would go on to accomplish (``Death of a Salesman'' was only 
     five years away) and I can think of no other revival that is 
     so enriched by retrospective knowledge. Anyone interested in 
     Mr. Miller's career, which has had an extraordinary 
     reconsideration in recent seasons, will be fascinated by the 
     strong roots he planted in this early play.
       Indeed, those who have seen any of the fine revivals of 
     recent vintage on Broadway--including ``Salesman,'' ``The 
     Price,'' ``A View From the Bridge,'' ``The Ride Down Mount 
     Morgan'' and ``The Crucible,'' which is currently at the 
     Virginia Theater--are likely to find their appreciation of 
     those plays enhanced by a viewing of this one. Here are the 
     issues of brotherly competition and fatherly betrayal that 
     Mr. Miller explored again and again. (The scene in 
     ``Salesman'' in which Willy Loman's egregious betrayal of his 
     family is revealed to his elder son, Biff, has a clear 
     antecedent here.)
       Here are the admonitions against succumbing wholeheartedly 
     to the lures of capitalism and against the sanctimony of 
     ugly-Americanism. Here is the pained ambivalence of Mr. 
     Miller toward the so-called American dream and the agony of a 
     citizen playwright over a wayward national conscience.
       All of these things were excitingly evident when I saw the 
     production last summer, but a couple of other contextual 
     elements weren't. One is the recent opening, 10 blocks north, 
     of ``Oklahoma!,'' the revived 1943 musical in which Rodgers 
     and Hammerstein presented a far different picture of American 
     than Arthur Miller ever has. The director of that show, 
     Trevor Nunn (who is British) and the choreographer, Susan 
     Stroman, have uncovered in it the more ominous underpinnings 
     of the national character. But even so, ``Oklahoma!'' ends 
     with a frontier trial that explicitly vindicates our hero, 
     the symbolic and joyous triump of expanding democracy.
       Contrarily, at the conclusion of ``The Man Who Had All the 
     Luck,'' David Beeves, a man who has made a great life the way 
     the founding fathers made a great nation, simply by landing 
     in the right place and seizing the awesome opportunity, 
     remains a self-doubter. He has just dodged one more bullet, 
     and future prosperity, embodied by his newborn son, seems 
     assured to everyone except himself.
       In the aftermath of Sept. 11, David's uncertainty seems 
     especially poignant and prescient, and especially opposed to 
     the bullheaded optimism of ``Oklahoma!,'' whose most comic 
     character is a lovable peddler (American enterprise at work!) 
     who happens to be from the Middle East.
       In other words, this production of ``Luck'' has a fair 
     amount of luck itself, at least in its remarkable timeliness. 
     The rest of its appeal can be attributed to skill.
       To begin with, the play is presented on Allen Moyer's 
     handsome sets--the garage that houses David's auto-repair 
     business and the home he takes over with his new wife after 
     the death of her father--that share a vaulting back wall that 
     suggests the unadorned roominess of the American plains. (The 
     props include a magnificent automobile, a 1930 Marmont.)
       And the play itself evinces the staunchness that has always 
     characterized the construction of Mr. Miller's work. This is 
     a drama with a fully thought-through dramatic arc and nine 
     large roles, even though, like an apprentice carpenter, Mr. 
     Miller banged in a few crooked nails. When the villainous 
     father of David's fiancee is run over by a car, even the 
     man's daughter shrugs and moves on without a sign. And the 
     play's structure is long on fundamental theme-fulfilling and 
     short on subtlety.
       Several characters, for example, exist to make a single 
     point, that most people succumb to a fateful flaw: J.B. 
     Feller (Richard Riehle), a successful local businessman who 
     invests in David's future, undermines his wish for a son with 
     his drinking. Shory (Dan Moran), a wheelchair-bound veteran, 
     curtailed his own sowing of wild oats with his penchant for 
     whoremongering. Dan Dibble (Mason Adams), an elderly farmer 
     who made a fortune raising mink, foreshadows his own personal 
     calamity with a speech about the necessity of looking after 
     your interests with unremitting vigilance.
       All the actors are fine, and they've been welded into a 
     nifty down-home-feeling ensemble by Mr. Ellis. Mr. Adams is 
     marvelously crotchety and self-absorbed in the part, never 
     more so than when he delivers this speech, which defends the 
     principles of capitalism and mink farming. It's a set piece, 
     much like the scene in which a baseball scout, played with 
     the blunt and entertaining elan of caricature by David Wohl, 
     explains his search for the source of a ballplayer's 
     incurable flaw. It's a grand character turn, and a fine use 
     of the sport as a metaphor for the American soul.
       Sam Robards, who plays Gustav Eberson, an Austrian 
     immigrant whose expertise and dreams become subservient to 
     David's naturally endowed privileges, hits just the right 
     notes of modesty and gratitude of someone who has bought into 
     the fabled promise of our country. The early scene in which 
     he enters David's garage and helps him repair the Marmont is 
     a finely, sweetly evoked illustration of the forging of a 
     lifelong bond.
       The one new cast member is Samantha Mathis, who plays 
     Hester Falk, David's fiancee and then wife. This is the 
     play's only significant female role, which tells us 
     something, I think, about the playwright's youth. Wisely, Ms. 
     Mathis plays the part with the undemonstrative but cheering 
     support of midcentury wifeliness, and as a couple she and Mr. 
     O'Donnell are the image of a small town's favorite 
     sweethearts.
       The two of them, like the play itself, evoke another era 
     altogether. As David's persistent fortune makes him ever more 
     paranoid--he's convinced it's only a matter of time until 
     fate cruelly catches up with him--she grows desperately 
     helpless. In the middle of the 20th century it was crazy to 
     think that a good-looking young American didn't deserve a 
     golden existence, or that America was living under the sword 
     of Damocles.
       Wasn't it?

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