Miller Talks on Drama, Urges Shift in Theme

To press closer to high tragedy and away from pathos, towards "the man who knows something" and away from the Willy Loman, is the aim of playwright Arthur Miller who delivered the Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture here yesterday.

"Fagged with our contemporary writing which goes on documenting the same loneliness and much the same defeat," Miller said he wants to consider the question whether a man can mature to the point where he knows that "there are compromises which he cannot make without the loss of his soul."

Later in a CRIMSON interview, Miller pointed out that the John Proctor, leading character in his new play, "The Crucible" is just such a man while Willy Loman, the lead in "Death of a Salesman," is not.

Break with Tradition

The issue which he wants to tap in his next play, Miller said, is "whether a relationship may exist between man and society which does not leave him less that he was, with aborted personality, essentially alone or even crushed . . . whether a man can not become more aware, more sensitive, instead of narrowing into a tool of survival and an organ of defensiveness."

He expressed his eagerness to get away from the dramatic tradition of the last 20 years which has shown how man "loses his identity or his dignity, how beauty is destroyed and only power takes its place." He added, "My aim is not to destroy the world, but to preserve it on a moral basis."

Dealing with man in this fashion, Miller said, it becomes impossible to cling to the surface realism of Ibsen's play of the family and the "living room," and at the same time give its proper force to the impact of the social process itself.

Force and the Individual

This is true, Miller said, because the social process of today, the industrial society, presents to man a force that is "no longer man, no longer human, but sheer power, imperative pure and simple and the individual cannot react to force as he does to an individual."

At the end of his speech, Miller read a letter he recently received from a leading member of the American Bar Association which complained lines in "The Crucible" derogatory to the legal profession and asked that these be edited or eliminated.