Arthur Miller's After the Fall Revived by Roundabout for 2004-2005 Season
By Ernio Hernandez
and Kenneth Jones
21 Nov 2003
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Arthur Miller
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| photo by Inge Morath | Roundabout Theatre Company will present Arthur Miller's drama After the Fall as part of the 2004-2005 season at the American Airlines Theatre.
Miller's play, which many believe is autobiographical, will see the New York stage under the direction of Michael Mayer — who directed Miller's A View From the Bridge for Roundabout in 1997. Previews will begin June 11, and opening night is slated for July 8. The limited engagement through Aug. 22, 2004.
After the Fall follows a lawyer in his forties who journeys into his past to discover how he ended up where he is. In his soul-searching quest, he revisits the death of his mother and a line of failed relationships, including one with a famous singer troubled by an addiction to sleeping pills and alcohol — believed by many to mirror the author's marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
The play debuted on Broadway in 1964 with Jason Robards, Jr. in the lead role and Barbara Loden as the singer — a turn that won her the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress. Hal Holbrook and Faye Dunaway also appeared in the work staged by Miller's oft-collaborator Elia Kazan.
Stagings of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Pacific Overtures and a Wallace Shawn adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera have also previously been announced for the 2004-2005 Roundabout season.
Roundabout has also produced Miller's The Price (1992) and The Man Who Had All The Luck (2002) and had a hand in recent revivals of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.
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Playbill On-Line previously reported that director Mayer was working with Miller on a revised version the play. He directed a summer 2001 reading of After the Fall which featured Academy Award-winner Hilary Swank ("Boys Don't Cry"), Peter Friedman and Linda Emond (Life x 3).
"[The reading] went really well and was very exciting," Mayer told Playbill On-Line (July, 2003). "I got a lot of ideas about how to work on it. It's a flawed masterpiece, I think. I met with Arthur a few times now to discuss what to do with it. I've got some ideas and he's very open to that. It's not so much rewriting as restructuring. Cutting and restructuring, I would say. I think the words are all there. He seemed very amenable."
"The inner journey of the protagonist," Mayer said attracted him to the play. "It's so psychologically rich: This man is sort of doing this exhaustive soul-searching and every betrayal and every infraction and every sort of challenge to understanding about what decency is — through his whole life — comes flooding back in a kind of stream of-consciousness way. It was very ahead of its time, I think. You see this man doing real battle with his demons with all the people in his life. You feel like before he can move forward and accept the love of a new woman in his life, he's got to somehow get beyond all the other relationships that have plagued him, and his own inadequacies and his own failings and the betrayals he has endured or witnessed — and the betrayals that he has actually perpetrated. I think it's a great, great play."
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