PLEASE, STOP PRODUCING THE CRUCIBLE

By Arthur Miller

I am writing this from the great beyond (which

looks exactly like the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, by the way) because my estate’s royalty statements won’t stop vibrating my burial plot.

Every single morning, I wake up, light up a fresh cig, and look at the theater listings. And every single morning, I am forced to ask the same question: Aren't you people sick of me yet?

This week alone, there are fourteen separate professional productions of The Crucible happening worldwide, not counting the five hundred high school versions where some poor sixteen-year-old named Jax is screaming about his "name" while his mustache falls off. Let me be perfectly frank with you: I wrote that play in 1953 because I had just read a terribly dry history book about 17th-century Salem and bet Elia Kazan twenty bucks I could make it seem erotic. I did not write it so that every suburban community theater director in America could dress the local dentists in matching beige smocks and call it a "timely reimagining."

It’s a bleak play! There are no jokes! John Proctor dies at the end, and honestly, by Act IV, everyone in the audience is wishing he’d just sign the damn paper so they can go the fuck home.

Why must we keep doing this? When I was alive, we didn't just endlessly recycle the same ten scripts. We lived. We created. We got into fistfights at Sardi’s.

I’ll never forget the spring of ’49. Marlon Brando, who was doing Streetcar at the time, shaved his eyebrows on a dare from Laurence Olivier, hopped on a stolen Vespa, and drove it directly into the orchestra pit during a matinee of Death of a Salesman. Lee J. Cobb didn't even break character. He just looked down at Marlon and carried on: "A salesman has got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory." We all wept. Then we went out and drank gin out of a fire extinguisher with Monty Clift. That’s theater.

But today? You just order a crate of dry ice, light a single hanging lightbulb, and call it an "uncompromising look at the American psyche."

Take Death of a Salesman. People treat Willy Loman like he’s some mythological figure of tragic proportions. He’s a guy working for an MLM who hallucinates his brother in the backyard! I wrote him to show the exhausting delusion of the American dream, not to provide a playground for every experimental director to stage the play entirely on a set made of trampolines to symbolize "the unstable bounce of the economy."

I remember sitting with Marilyn in our Connecticut kitchen, sometime in ‘57, and she looked up from her toast and said, "Artie, do you think people will still be performing 'All My Sons' in seventy years?" And I laughed so hard I farted. I said, "Darling, by 2026, nobody is going to care about a 1940s manufacturer who sold faulty airplane cylinder heads."

Yet here we are. You’ve got famous film actors taking breaks from superhero franchises just to come to Broadway, sweat through a tweed suit, and yell at a kitchen table for two and a half hours.

It reminds me of the time Paul Newman decided he wanted to play Biff in a summer stock production up in Maine. During the big emotional climax where Biff cries on Willy’s shoulder, a woman seated in the front row fainted so violently she concussed herself on the rail. Paul didn't skip a beat. He paused, winked at the unconscious woman, did forty push-ups to keep his heart rate up, and then finished the scene. Humphrey Bogart was in the wings, completely plastered, shouting, "Give 'em the blue eyes, kid! Give 'em the blue eyes!"

You don't get that kind of showmanship anymore. Now you just get "concept" revivals. I heard rumors of a production of The Crucible next season where the witches are all represented by air fryers to comment on the "automated nature of oppression."

Please. I beg of you. Look at the thousands of brilliant, contemporary plays sitting on desks right now. Produce those. Give some living playwright the chance to watch a director completely misinterpret their work. Let me rest.

If you absolutely must perform my work to fill your seasonal subscriptions, at least have the decency to do one of the weird ones. Where is the high school production of The Creation of the World and Other Business? Why isn't anyone reviving The Ride Down Mt. Morgan?

Until then, I’ll be up here, splitting a sleeve of stale saltines with Arthur Miller’s greatest critic: Arthur Miller. And if I see one more poster featuring a silhouette of a man holding a briefcase in front of a chain-link fence, I am going to find a way to haunt your box office.