"Arthur Miller's

THURSDAY, OCT 26
RACKFIAM AUDITORIUM
2 P.M.

• Welcome from President
Lee C. Bollinger
• Greetings from Provost
Nancy Cantor
• Comments by Dean of
LS&A Shirley Neuman
• Presentation of a resolu-
tion in honor of Arthur
Miller by state govern-
ment officials.
2:30 P.M.
"From Ann Arbor to
Broadway and Back Again"
Professor Enoch Brater,
symposium director
3 Rm.
"A Conversation with
Arthur Miller"
4:15 P.M.
Recognition ceremony for
the establishment of the
Arthur Miller Theatre at
the University of
Michigan

RACKHAM AMPHITHEATER
8-10 P.M.

Arthur Miller:
"It's the price you pay
for living so long. You
go around collecting all
of these honors."

"Arthur Miller's Theater:

An International Panel"
• Linda Ben-Zvi,
Tel Aviv University
• Laura (ems°, Universidad
de Buenos Aires
• John Dorsey, Rikkyo
University, 7:9kyo
• 16m ten Heivkt Copenhagen
• Louis Marks, BBC
Drama, London
• Hersh Zeifinan, .Birk
University, Toronto

FRIDAY, OCT. 27

RACKHAM WEST
CONFERENCE Room

8:30-10:15 A.M.
"Contemporary Re-Visions:
Adaptations of
Arthur Miller's Plays"

• Ruby Cohn, University
of Califbrnia, Davis
• Elinor Fuchs,
Yale School of Drama
• Deborah Geis,
Oberlin College
10:30 A.N1.-NOON
Recent Work
for the Stage"
• Robert Scanlan,
American Repertory

It's Miller Time

U-M honors one of its most accomplished alumni with an 85th-birthday celebration.

BILL CARROLL
Special to the Jewish News

T

he University of Michigan has scheduled a
special homecoming this fall in addition to
its traditional Wolverine football weekend.
Internationally acclaimed playwright Arthur
Miller, one of U-M's most famous graduates, will be
honored on the occasion of his 85th birthday (Oct. 17)
with the Arthur Miller International Symposium, run-
ning Oct. 26-28 on the campus in Ann Arbor.
Organized by faculty and others who got together,
"Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a
Century of Change" is a series of conversations and
panel discussions featuring critics, scholars and
directors from around the world — including Miller
himself, who visits the university periodically.
"It's the price you pay for living so long," Miller, a

10/20
2000

84

1938 U-M grad, quipped from his farm in Roxbury,
Conn. "You go around collecting all of these honors."
The writer of Death of a Salesman, A View From
the Bridge, The Crucible and other highly acclaimed
plays, Miller will rake in a lot of those honors during
the symposium — billed as a celebration of his
works and life. The symposium is free and open to
the public at the Rackham Auditorium.
The celebration actually begins Wednesday evening,
Oct. 25, when Miller will receive the International
Achievement Award, one of six Governors' Awards for
Arts & Culture presented by ArtServe Michigan, a
nonprofit organization that supports arts, artists and
cultural activities in the state.
The five other winners are Michiganians — includ-
ing Detroit Symphony Orchestra vice chair Peter
Cummings — but Miller qualifies because he's a U-
M alumnus. The gala event will be held at Henry

Ford Museum & Greenfield Village in Dearborn.
And Miller aficionados at U-M still are bubbling
over the announcement earlier this year that a 600-seat
Arthur Miller Theatre will be built on the Ann Arbor
campus. It will be housed in the Walgreen Drama
Center, a theater complex being built next to the Power
Center for the Performing Arts on central campus.
The $18 million center is made possible by $10
million in gifts from philanthropist and drugstore
mogul Charles Walgreen Jr., another U-M alumnus.
Miller's honors and literary achievements are even
more remarkable in view of the fact that he was first
rejected by U-M because of "poor academic per-
formance." Since his grades ruled out the possibility
of a scholarship, he took a private reading course
and worked at a series of jobs to raise tuition money.
Born in New York City, Miller is the son of an
Austrian immigrant whose coat manufacturing busi-

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