Not a dime a dozen?

I had a friend in college who got really upset the first time Michael Jordan retired. Well, he wasn't a friend, more like an aquaintance. Well, no actually, I just plain didn't like him. He was the kind of economics major who thought about the whole world in terms of economics--for instance, he was against the death penalty not for moral, scientific, or social reasons, but because it cost too much to hold someone on Death Row during the appeals process. "If we executed them quicker, it would cost less, and I'd be for it," he said once. He was that kind of guy. Anyway, he was a Chicagoan and revered Jordan, so when the retirement happened and I said, "Not to be callous, but so what?" he was incredibly pissed off at me. He knew that I revered the playwright Arthur Miller, and said "How would you like it if I said that when Arthur Miller died?"

Well, of course, Michael Jordan hadn't died, just retired--and as history showed, he could unretire himself, and did so twice. But now, Arthur Miller will never write another play.

I wanted to be a playwright once, and Miller was my idol. I think I've read more of his plays than most doctoral theater students, and I'm even one of the few people to direct one of his later plays: "Some Kind of Love Story," a one-act. Very few of Miller's later plays garnered attention, but I read them anyway. Some were bad, some were brilliant. All were Arthur Miller.

I admit, probably some of my affection for him came from his living in Connecticut, like me. He was also born in Brooklyn, like me. From thereon, there aren't any similarities, but I'll take what I can.

When I was in high school and college, it was very fashionable for snot-nosed kids like me (and the theater folks with whom I hung out) to denigrate Miller, pointing out that "he only wrote Death of a Salesman and nothing else," as if Death of a Salesman wasn't enough to put anyone on the map. But we were more impressed by Edward Albee, especially in his avant-garde phase; Miller was just so conventional. Or so we thought. Never mind that he built a play around his life, After the Fall, which was wonderfully avant-garde. Never mind that he also wrote a less well-known, but incredibly theatrical, play called The American Clock, about the Great Depression, which used vaudeville of all things as a jumping-off point. (And never mind that Salesman certainly wasn't his only theatrical success.)

Still, I was a closet Miller lover, and I think time has proved me right. There's just something simple and primal about his work, and he deserves his place in the pantheon of American theater.

I'll miss him...