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to make sense of their lives."
The Schisgal play, first produced
in 1984, concerns a self-made Jewish
businessman who returns to the
inner-city apartment where he grew
up, searching for the roots of his
unhappiness. The black man who
now lives in the apartment, the son
of the janitor who had worked at the
neighborhood shul, has his own
problems.
"The two men take a rather
remarkable journey where they dis-
cover what it means to hit the bot-
tom of the human spirit and step
out into the next phase of life,"
Moyer Hart said.
Despite its somber themes, the
play is written with a wry humor,
she said.
Schisgal was best known in the
1970s and '80s, with the success of
two one-act plays performed as a
pair, The Typist and The Tiger.
Moving on to Hollywood, he
adapted The Tiger for the screen
and was one of three screenwriters
for the Dustin Hoffman movie
Tootsie. More recently, he was pro-
ducer of the Catskills period-piece
Memories Of Arthur Miller
Take-Out, TV and Olivier.
JOHN HEILPERN
Arthur Miller wrote Death of a
Featurewell. corn
Salesman."
I thought Miller would bust a gut —
he was laughing so much. At the same
time, he was thrilled. Here was a man
— an ordinary man — who was going
to the theater to see a play, and he was
just giving his honest response. The man
was glad to be there, too.
There was nothing elitist about Arthur
Miller or his plays. He was influenced
by Ibsen and the Greeks, but he wrote
from the gut, unafraid of the pull of
honest emotion expressed by so-called
ordinary folk. It's why we could connect
with his great dramas, for all family wars
and disappointments and yearnings are
universal. Willy Loman is a "low man"
— not a god or king, but Everyman.
Miller kept a carpentry shop at his
home in Litchfield County (Conn.),
where he made simple and workmanlike
tables and chairs for the house, crafts-
manlike and undecorative like his plays.
He was a tall and famously handsome
man, and his huge hands looked as if
they could smash a typewriter in two.
His modest writing studio was isolated
in the surrounding grounds of the
house. The room was virtually barren,
with cheap linoleum on the floors, no
pictures on the walls, no telephone. At
the time, he worked at a desk he'd made
and wrote on a 30-year-old typewriter.
His Roxbury, Conn., home, however,
was more of an estate, with at least 350
acres: Miller was almost certainly the
wealthiest playwright of our time (next
to Neil Simon).
Interviewing him a few years ago for a
Vanity Fair piece, I assumed that the
published play version of Death of a
Salesman must have been his biggest sell-
er, but he corrected me: It was The
Crucible, his moral parable of the
McCarthy witch-hunts that became a
universal tragedy of fanaticism and intol-
erance.
There had been different publishers of
The Crucible since 1953, however, and
he didn't know exactly how many copies
of it had been sold. Would I try to find
out for him? So the researchers at the
magazine got to work on the play's tan-
gled publishing history, and they came
up with the staggering number of 4 1/2
million. "You live and learn," said
Miller, impressed.
I couldn't resist adding that if he
earned a dollar a copy, by my reckoning
that made it well over 2 million dollars
1p
erhaps we all felt we knew
Arthur Miller, for to know a
man's plays is to be on friendly
terms with the man. I wouldn't pretend
to have known Miller personally, but we
met a number of times and talked by
phone, and each time I was left with a
pleasurable insight into him.
For an American icon, he was particu-
larly unpretentious and human. A while
ago, I was asked along to a dinner give
A Walk on the Moon.
JET has staged 74 Georgia
Avenue once before. "It's less acer-
bic than Schisgal's other plays,"
Orbach said. "There's actually a
mystical element to it as well."
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Arthur Miller with second wife Marilyn
Monroe, who converted to Judaism.
JET's double bill, The Last
Yankee and 74 Georgia Avenue,
runs March 16-April 17 at the
Aaron DeRoy Theatre in the
West Bloomfield JCC. Previews
begin Wednesday, March 16,
with opening night 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 20. Performances
are 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-
Thursdays; 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2
and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. The
Wednesday, April 6, performance
will take place at 2 p.m.
Ticket prices range from $25-
$37. Senior and student dis-
counts are available; $15 rush
tickets go on sale two hours
before every show.
To purchase tickets or for
more information, call
(248) 788-2900.
by an old friend of his who lived in two
chaotic rooms of the Chelsea Hotel.
"Beautiful take-out," he said, teasing
the host, who couldn't cook to save his
life. The take-out wasn't so hot either.
Miller was easy to talk to, like an eld-
erly uncle. He looked pleased when I
mentioned I'd just seen a fine revival of
All My Sons.
"Yeah, I enjoyed it, too," he said
unselfconsciously.
Then I told him what happened dur-
ing the intermission. A middle-aged
man sitting next to me told me how
much he liked the show and began to
study his Playbill intently. At length, he
looked up and said, "I didn't know
John Heilpern is the author of "How
Good is David Mamet, Anyway?:
Writings on Theater — and Why It
Matters."