After the Fall

It's easier to treat After the Fall like any other new American play, now that the shock and reverence of Arthur Miller's self-revelation have died. The author's narrow face stared at you from the newspapers and magazines before the New York opening almost 17 months ago, and with his name came, whispered, Marilyn Monroe, now the late Mrs. Miller. So you felt like a privileged voyeur when you took your seat in the Lincoln Center Repertory Company's temporary theatre in Washington, especially when you learned that the play's director was a character in the play--one of the bad guys.

But in undramatic Boston, at the end of the American National Theatre's tour, the tangibility of the real-life persons dissolves, leaving only the drama itself and its stated abstractions "in the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin, a contemporary man." It is Quentin's question, his search for hope and love after innocence has been lost, that must be real, not the past lives of Arthur Miller or Elia Kazan. But his eternal question is overshadowed by Maggie (Miss Monroe), by The Committee, and family, persons, and issues which become foci of dramatic attention instead of paths to Quentin's answer.

"I have a bit of a decision to make," begins Quentin, to an unnamed listener--perhaps society, perhaps his conscience--whether or not to commit himself again, to a woman. "But look at my life. A life, after all, is evidence, and I have two divorces in my safe-deposit box." However, he admits, "With all this darkness, the truth is that every morning when I awake, I'm full of hope!" For what, then, is he searching?

Quentin seeks to justify his courage in the face of disaster. And because his decision has already been made, his search over before he greets us, he undergoes no continuous change and has no coherent struggles. His confessions themselves stand separate struggles, with truth, justice, and the American way, and they are real, they are Miller's creations, because his mastery lies in dialogue and situation. In moments that Arthur Miller, playwright, shouts down Arthur Miller, philosopher, After the Fall shakes with tremendous power.

The kaleidoscopic first act mixes Quentin's recent and distant memories, showing almost immediately Quentin's four women: Louise, his first wife; Maggie, his second; Holga, to be his next; and Felice, a young dancer who brought him love but asked for no committment, unlike the other three women. We see a family disaster, his father's financial ruin; a political catastrophe--the decision of Mickey, a lawyer, to "name the names" to The Committee--and a moral catastrophe--the suicide of Lou, Mickey and Quentin's old professor of law, when no one but Quentin would support him against The Committee; and a personal disaster, the break-up of Quentin's first marriage. And he meets Maggie.

Maggie thrusts herself upon a bewildered Quentin, who quickly sees the falsehood of loving her. "The first honor... was that I hadn't tried to go to bed with her! God, the hypocrisy!... Because, I was only afraid, and she took it for a tribute to her...'value'!" Yet he attempts to bring her "limitless love." And throughout the second act, Maggie's act, Quentin's people punctuate the action of his memory with sudden stares or snatches from past dialogue. At all the accusations, at Maggie's drugged breathing, at Holga's weeping at the ruins of a concentration camp, Quentin cries, "Always in your own blood-covered name you turn your back!"

He affirms his own guilt--"Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls!" --yet he risks forgiveness, and love, once more. He says "Hello," to Holga, ending the play as he began it.

What one remembers at the theatre exit, however, are not Quentin's monologues but the carefully written group scenes, the distillations of a life that could provide several plays. One just doesn't listen to Quentin's speeches, and his generalized guilt becomes real only in what is now the largest of dramatic commonplaces, the mass murders of Nazi Germany. Quentin's prolix introspection provides only relaxation before the next rise of tension, the scenes that are the play's reality. As such, After the Fall is a dramatist's tour de force, but not a live play.

Incident at Vichy, Miller's most recent work, is the giveaway, for it dwells entirely on the only generalizable theme in After the Fall, the guilt of genocide. And even Vichy is too consciously a "message play," resting too much on ideas and not enough on people. Miller's people cannot, unlike J. Alfred Prufrock or Moses E. Herzog, asks the big questions and yet stay in the skins their creators gave them. When Charley, in Death of a Salesman, tries to make Willy Loman the embodiment of the tragic salesman, he sounds phony. And when Quentin speaks of all men's guilt as his own, he too sounds phony. He is not a big enough figure to pass his private disasters off as the disasters of his age.

Still, the debilitating shock is there, and this touring company skillfully meets the play's demanding range of emotion. Charles Aidman's Quentin grows quietly, barely changing tone in most of the first act, until his final scene with Louise. The actor's mental and physical exhaustion by the end of the three hours on stage, mirrors that of the character, who has relived the most horrible moments of his life. Judi West as Maggie creates, in her first scene, the uneasiness we should expect even without our foreknowledge of Maggie's suicide. She is a pitiable, blond rag doll, figure clutching her bottle of whisky and jar of pills while viciously accusing Quentin of sins he never committed.

The production never drags. It does all that is humanly possible to curb Miller's obstinate philosophizing and heighten the playable moments in what seems on paper to be a pretentious bore. It is not so on the stage because the author, in spite of himself, has created real people.