Stage

...at the Lincoln Center...

...The implications of the piece escape me if it is to be taken as something more general than one man's complex struggle with his own best instincts...

...is well worth a trip to Lincoln Center, even though new birth at home is not quiet as exciting as resurrection abroad...

...Although her conviction that their lives have meant nothing and that the world is "continually getting worse" fits badly with what she calls his "goddamned hopefulness," they are a pair of survivors who depend on one another for whatever human connection they have...

...STAGE A PAIR OF SURVIVORS MILLER'S 'DANGER: MEMORY!' Thhe return of Arthur Miller has been much heralded in the press—see, for instance, Mel Gussow's piece in the New York Times (February 1)—but he has not really been far away...

...There are no revelations in what is, after all, a familiar Miller story (it hovers over After the Fall and The Price), but it gains by being put into a larger context...

...The small theater is also an appropriate enclosure thematically, reflecting the Eastern European Country which is both home and trap for the characters...

...A "mosaic," as Miller called it in a note to Wood, it is a group portrait of the Depression inspired by Studs Terkel's Hard Times...

...The play ends now not with the romantic affirmation of the smuggled manuscript, but with the quieter recognition that Sigmund's staying has much more than personal meaning, and with his desire that his American friend take out of the country the letters he has received from literary figures all over the world...

...Whatever the provenance of the script, The American Clock, in Peter Wood's vigorous production, is the more successful of the two...

...The director can only serve him here, and Wood does so splendidly...

...As Mason Adams and Geraldine Fitzgerald play the parts, their prickli-ness becomes a function of their closeness, and memory seems less dangerous than the general title suggests...

...Clara is a more difficult play to reduce to a few sentences...

...Both plays differ from the versions performed at home...

...Miller told me in a letter that these are the original scripts, restored to erase the production changes made when they first appeared, but then, he also said that he gave the originals to Methuen for publication and the National version of The American Clock has scenes and characters not in the Methuen play...

...Clara was a psychologist whose patients were prisoners and ex-prisoners, one of whom was her lover...

...Although the man, a Puerto Rican who had killed an earlier girlfriend, is the prime suspect, Clara's father cannot remember his name until he has made a convoluted trip into his own past, dredging up his own ability to kill (during World War II) and his saving his black troops from a Southern lynch mob, an action which seems to have given Clara her fearlessness and her dedication...

...Despite my doubts about Clara, Danger: Memory...

...But the unifying plot that snakes through the fragments has to do with the Baums, a well-heeled Jewish family made suddenly poor...

...It is true that he has not had a successful new play on Broadway since The Price (1968), and that he has published a great deal of non-dramatic work in the last twenty years, but the new plays have kept coming—full length, one-act, television—and his earlier plays have been regularly revived by professional and amateur companies all across the country—even before the Dustin Hoffman Death of a Salesman offered its imprimatur...

...Two major productions of All My Sons within a few months—at the Long Wharf in New Haven and on PBS—may be unusual but hardly ground-breaking...

...Even so, I was surprised when I went to London at the end of last year and found Miller represented at both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and by plays—The American Clock, The Archbishop's Ceiling — whose American reception had been disastrous...

...The process tags him as an ac184 complice in his daughter's murder, having infected her with dangerous if admirable liberal sentiments, and his recognition of his complicity frees him to finger the man...

...Unless the lieutenant is taken simply as a device like the dead Clara, who makes an appearance as a child, the play becomes both arbitrary and preposterous...

...It is that context which works best in the production, the piece as a whole being much stronger than any of the individual scenes...

...The play is further troublesome in that it is presented as a police investigation, an aggressive homicide detective's picking constantly at the befuddled father, nastily so as James Tolkan plays him...

...In it, a young woman has just been murdered...

...The cross currents of political and personal motivations, once little more than stalking horses for abstract ideas, now really belong to the characters, giving the play greater richness, although Maya's decline from symbol to drunk is not completely rewarding...

...in fact, a more difficult play to accept...

...When The Archbishop's Ceiling was first done at the Kennedy Center, the characters were little more than representative figures in a play of ideas (see Commonweal, July 8, 1977...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Wood keeps the stage in constant motion, one scene fading quickly into another, the specific dissolving into the general, and all accompanied by period music...

...Here at home, Miller is working on a much smaller scale in the two one-acters that make up Danger: Memory...

...in fact, some of the characters, like Arthur Robertson, the financier whom Miller uses as narrator, come directly from Terkel...

...The community of writers transcends any one nation, the play suggests, but the individual's place in the larger community rests in part on his struggle within his own country...

...Perhaps he is there as the father's accusatory other self, a mechanism to keep the self-analysis from becoming a monologue...

...Can't Remember Anything is a two-character play in which Lee and Leonora, two old friends, meet—as they presumably always do--for dinner in his kitchen and carry on a cross-purpose conversation crippled by her refusal to remember the past and his constant evocation of a roseate view of the years in which her husband, his partner, was the center of their existence...

...At the RSC, they seem much more human, partly because they now inhabit The Pit, where they once rattled around the immense Kennedy stage...

...The theatricality of so mobile a mosaic is as much Wood as Miller, but the thematic close, in which the painful decade is celebrated for the vitality of the American people, belongs to the playwright...

...Short scenes concentrate on reactions to the crash, a farm foreclosure, a relief office...

...Once again, the action centers on Sigmund, the writer who must choose between the risk of prison and the exile that will cut him off from his cultural roots...