Arts & Life MEXICAN GRILL Not just big burritos. Big flavors.® IMAGES OF AMERICA made FAST made FRESH made RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU BUY 1 ENTREE GET 1 ENTREE FREE with purchase of a reg. drink from page 81 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." not latid %vitt] any other coupon expires 8/31/05 FIND A QDOBA CLOSE TO YOU FARMINGTON HILLS 33224 W 12 Mile Rd. at Farmington Road next to Blockbuster & Farmer Jack 248-324-2185 SOUTHFIELD 25243 Evergreen Rd. at 10 Mile in Park Place Shopping Complex 248-799-8210 BIRMINGHAM 795 E. Maple Rd. at Woodward next to Kroger 248-988-8941 OTHER LOCATIONS ITN 3/10 2005 86 ROYAL OAK ROCHESTER HILLS FLINT GRAND BLANC EAST LANSING www.qdoba.com 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."