The Jefferson Lecture

ON MARCH 26, at the Concert Hall of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., playwright Arthur Miller gave the 2001 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. His talk, titled “On Politics and the Art of Acting,” reflected on the demands made of modern politicians to construct sound bites and sincere appearances for a television audience.

Miller has a long history as a social critic. From his first hit play, All My Sons, which examines individual greed and social responsibility, to The Crucible, which used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for the excesses of McCarthyism, Miller’s works turn a critical eye on American society. No play does this more convincingly than Death of a Salesman. The play, which opened in 1949, tells the story of Willy Loman, an aging salesman who makes his way “on a smile and shoeshine.” Miller lifts Willy’s illusions and failures, his anguish and his family relationships, to the scale of a tragic hero. Miller says, “It is time that we, who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time—the heart and spirit of the average man.”

Death of a Salesman went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and is the most celebrated of Miller’s thirty plays. He directed it again in 1983 when it was produced at the People’s Art Theater in Beijing. His other works include A View from the Bridge, The Misfits, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, The Price, The American Clock, Broken Glass, Mr. Peters’ Connections, and his autobiography Timebends. Miller has earned seven Tony Awards, two Drama Critics Circle Awards, an Obie, an Olivier, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. He holds honorary degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University.

Throughout his life, Miller has written with conscience and clarity. As Chris Keller says to his mother in All My Sons, “Once and for all you must know that there’s a universe outside, and you’re responsible to it.” Miller’s work is infused with an artist’s responsibility to humanity and to his audience. “The playwright is nothing without his audience,” he writes. “He is one of the audience who happens to know how to speak.”