AFTER THE FALL
Other successful memory plays, like Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, have a life apart from the playwright’s real-life dirty laundry. But Miller isn’t willing–or perhaps able–to transform the past into art. He wants to analyze, interpret, and most of all shape it so that it will yield the writer a clean emotional payoff. O’Neill never minimized the dangers of his past, and Williams always let his characters feel for themselves, but in effect Miller won’t even let his characters speak for themselves. Besides, Miller is the kind of writer who must be the hero of his own play. The weakest kind of hero, too–one who wants forgiveness without really putting his sins onstage.
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Miller’s stand-in, Quentin, talks for three hours, recalling characters and scenes from his life, which are then acted out. He treats the audience as if they were his jury, pleading with them, exhorting them, confessing to them, offering extenuations, and accusing everyone but them. Appropriately, almost every line Quentin speaks is a question, invariably rhetorical. Quentin is both playwright and lawyer, intent on producing evidence: ambling through his life, he uses the power of free association to pull characters out of the void and make them disappear, cross-referencing one memory with another as if they were so many clues to the mystery of himself. Quentin is on a quest, but for what? Perhaps for a credo he can live with, perhaps for an identity, perhaps for a way to escape his solipsism. (He’s so desperate that when he visits the blockhouse of a Nazi death camp, he envies the perverse solidarity that piled up all these stones.)
Quentin doesn’t fare much better with his marriages, which only serve to expose the “lie of limitless love.” His first wife, Louise, is tired of him always shaming her for her lack of a life and resents his neglect and indifference. She too wants to be real, which means breaking away from a man who treats her like a legal brief. (These moments play as if Miller–excuse me, Quentin–thinks that by exposing the flaws in the first marriage he can exonerate himself for what he does in the next.)
The closing moments pack an emotional wallop partly because Quentin drops his quest, and thus Miller interrupts his characters less often. But Miller’s general tendency to dry out his material, turning memories into moralizing, makes After the Fall a vastly inferior play to A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The narration, which flattens what it should bring to life, turns Miller’s past into an illustrated lecture. Eugene O’Neill was confident enough to let his memories speak for themselves; imagine him interrupting the Tyrone family’s multifaceted self-destruction to weigh in with an editorial!
