Arthur Miller

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This play tells the story of Willy Loman, an ageing salesman, who is a failure in both his business and private life. Fired by his firm, ignored by his children, his humiliation ends in suicide.

"El crisol" puede enmarcarse en la categoría de teatro político, por un lado, y teatro histórico, por otro. Ambientada en las colonias inglesas en el Nuevo Mundo, a finales del siglo XVII, la obra no habria sido escrita de no ser por otro momento historico: lo que dos siglos y medio despues estaba aconteciendo en Estados Unidos y en el resto del mundo, justo en los albores de la conocida como Guerra Fria. Otra "caza de brujas", la que tuvo lugar a principios de los años 50 del pasado siglo, sin duda una de las mas conocidas, que el propio Miller sufrio y durante la que escribio "El crisol".Los acontecimientos que se produjeron en Salem, Massachusetts, en 1692, durante los cuales casi doscientas personas fueron acusadas de practicar la brujeria, y que terminaron con la ejecucion de varios inocentes, son una manifestacion perversa del panico de las autoridades ante la perdida de poder y su empeño por restaurarlo. Lo que empezo siendo un juego de niñas termino convirtiendose en un instrumento para hacer volver a los colonos al redil de la fe y las buenas costumbres, estableciendo una suerte de imperio del terror. El paralelismo entre Salem y los albores de la Guerra Fria figura en el mapa de nuestra conciencia historica gracias a la obra del genial dramaturgo norteamericano.

Quizá algo que nadie puede negarle a Arthur Miller es haber sido una de las grandes voces críticas del siglo XX, de los pocos que han sido consecuentes con la idea de que el teatro debe ser un lugar desde el que se remueven y azotan conciencias y se analiza la manera en que vivimos. Pero Miller nunca recurre a sermones y convierte siempre la "percepcion moral" en forma dramatica a traves de personajes claramente individualizados. Testigo de excepcion de hechos importantes del siglo XX, la Gran Depresion de los años 30, la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la Guerra Fria, el maccarthysmo, la guerra de Vietnam, el derrumbe del comunismo e incluso la caida de las Torres Gemelas, sobre todos ellos ha expresado su punto de vista desde la creacion dramatica o desde sus escritos teoricos o periodisticos."La muerte de un viajante" esta unanimemente considerada la obra cumbre de Arthur Miller. La fuerza de la historia reside tanto en lo que cuenta como en la manera de contarlo. La obra nos relata las ultimas veinticuatro horas en la vida de un viajante de sesenta y tres años llamado Willy Loman, con un magistral retrato de unos personajes que, siendo portavoces de una epoca, son por encima de todo unicos y singulares, en una atmosfera onirica, inquietante y emotiva.

A reticent personnel manager living with his mother, Mr Newman shares the prejudices of his times and of his neighbours - and neither a Hispanic woman abused outside his window nor the persecution of the Jewish store owner he buys his paper from are any of his business. Until Newman begins wearing glasses, and others begin to mistake him for a Jew.

Victor, a New York cop nearing retirement, moves among furniture in the disused attic of a house marked for demolition. Cabinets, desks, a damaged harp, an overstuffed armchair - the relics of a lost life of affluence he's finally come to sell. But when his brother Walter, who he hasn't spoken to in years, arrives, the talk stops being just about whether Victor's been offered a fair price for the furniture, and turns to the price that one and not the other of them paid when their father lost both his fortune and the will to go on!

Quentin is a successful lawyer in New York, but inside his head he is struggling with his own sense of guilt and the shadows of his past relationships. One of these an ill-fated marriage to the charming and beautiful Maggie, who went from operating a switchboard to become a self-destructive star - a singer everyone wanted a piece of. After the Fall is often seen as the most explicitly autobiographical of Arthur Miller's plays, and Maggie as an unflinching portrait of Miller's ex-wife Marilyn Monroe, only two years after her suicide. But in its psychological acuity and depth, and its brilliant, dreamlike structure, it is a literary, and not just biographical, masterpiece.

In his lifetime the great American playwright Arthur Miller published two highly regarded collections of stories, "I Don't Need You Any More" (1967) and "Homely Girl, a Life" (1995). Shortly after his death in 2005 a final collection, "Presence" (2007), appeared. Now, all eighteen of these stories are gathered together in one volume for the first time, including the six from "Presence", previously only published in the USA. In his plays Miller took on the big themes of the day, putting stories of the Depression, wartime deceit and the McCarthy era on stage with an energy and passion not seen before and rarely since. In these stories he turns his attention to smaller, more intimate themes, yet still brings to bear the profound insight, humanism, empathy and wit of his work for the theatre. Including the early, O. Henry Award-winning "I Don't Need You Anymore", the original story of "The Misfits" on which the film was based, and the beautiful late story "Presence", this collection offers a fresh perspective on the great writer and his work, here informed by an unusual sensuality and delicacy. When "Homely Girl, a Life" was published in America the critic for the "New York Times" wrote of those three stories: 'The ability to sum up in clear, unequivocal prose the essence of emotion, a situation, a theme - characteristic of Mr Miller's best writing - makes the reader wish that these stories were longer, and that there were more of them.' At last there are.

In Vichy France, 1942, a group of men sit outside an office, waiting to be interviewed. The reason they have been pulled off the street and taken there is obvious enough. They are, for the most part, Jews. But how serious an offence this is, and how they are to suffer for it, is not clear, and they hope for the best. But as rumours pass between them of trains full of people locked from the outside and furnaces in Poland, and although they reassure themselves that nothing so monstrous could be true, their panic rises.