Creating music “too deep for words”—Arthur Miller, Alex North, and Death of a Salesman

In 1975, when George C. Scott directed and starred in the Circle in the Square revival of Death of a Salesman, the producers replaced the music used in Elia Kazan’s original 1949 production with new incidental music by Craig Wasson. Similarly, in 1999 when the Roundabout Theatre revived the play with Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman, the producers opted for new music by Richard Woodbury. The current Broadway revival, directed by Mike Nichols with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the lead role, restores the original music by Alex North, as did the 1984 revival featuring Dustin Hoffman. Just how intrinsic is North’s music to the play?

Arthur Miller described his first meeting with North in an interview with Sanya Shoilevska Henderson for her book Alex North, Film Composer:

It was [Elia] Kazan’s idea to put Alex on the Death of a Salesman project. It was a brilliant idea. I met Alex in Kazan’s house in Manhattan where we were preparing the production of the play. At our first meeting he played some music of Death of a Salesman on the piano. I was very touched by that. It was very moving music. It was the first time in my experience that I heard of a symphonic approach to the theater. In other words, each of the main characters had a theme as they would in a symphony. And those themes were combined, they were fugal, all kinds of forms created around those themes. I don’t think we changed very much of what he first initiated. 

In the first line of his stage directions to Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller calls for a single instrument:

A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises. . . . From the right, Willy Loman, the Salesman, enters, carrying two large sample cases. The flute plays on. He hears but is not aware of it. 

North added more than a flute but he had constraints. The original theater, the Morosco, had no orchestra pit. The duration of the music and the number of musicians he could use were determined by the regulations of the Musicians Union: no more than twenty-four minutes and no more than four musicians. North chose an ensemble of alto flute, cello, trumpet, and clarinet with occasional change to alto clarinet. He scored twenty-two-and-a-half minutes of music. The music was not taped; it was performed live at every performance, which required North to create a new sound stage technique, which Henderson describes:

[North] required the musicians to perform from an off-stage room of the theater, a so-called “padded cell,” located way up at the top of the stage. Since they could not see the scene, the musicians had a red light flash in the room, which the assistant stage manager would turn on when they were supposed to start playing, and turn off when they had to stop. The music was transmitted through a microphone to the speakers in the theater with the volume controlled behind the stage. The musicians unfortunately never had a chance to see the play. 

Critics immediately registered the impact North’s music had on the play. Death of a Salesman opened in New York on February 10, 1949. In the March 27 issue of The New York Times Howard Taubman hailed North’s “brilliant, imaginative score” in an article devoted almost entirely to the play’s music:

Willy’s death takes place off stage and here Mr. North’s music builds up a shattering climax that takes the place of words and action. The requiem music gives a pathos to the scene that is perhaps too deep for words. Here music serves a function for which there is probably no substitute in all the theatre arts. 

Miller acknowledged his debt to North in his interview with Henderson: “You can’t separate the music from the play, or the play from the music.” Asked by Charles Isherwood why he chose to restore the original music, director Nichols responded: “For one it’s a very good score, and oddly it’s the one thing I do remember from seeing the play [when he was seventeen].”

North collaborated with Kazan again in creating the score for the film version of Death of a Salesman (1951) and the path-breaking, jazzy score for the film of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Both received Oscar nominations for Best Music. He would work with Miller again in composing the music for the John Huston film The Misfits (1961). However, North may be best known today as the composer of the ballad “Unchained Melody,” a song from the film Unchained (1955) before it became a global sensation as the theme song to the hit film Ghost (1990).

Also of interest:

• Sarah Fishko’s profile of Alex North on NPR 
• Listen to the opening theme from Alex North's score for Death of a Salesman on Spotify 
• Alex North’s family maintains a comprehensive website about him
• Elia Kazan, director of many of the most celebrated plays of the 20th century, a previous Reader’s Almanac post 

Related LOA works: Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944–1961 (includes Death of a Salesman and the screenplay for The Misfits)

Laurence Senelick on the plays of Arthur Miller’s middle phase, experimentalism in theater, and (of course) Marilyn Monroe

Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory and director of graduate studies at Tufts University, recently spoke with us about the fourteen plays in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1962–1981.

This second volume of Arthur Miller’s collected plays feels like it inaugurates a new phase of his career. Do you agree? How would you describe Miller’s middle period?

Miller began as a playwright following the model of Ibsen: a well-wrought dramatic structure building up to a revelation of a moral dilemma. This is the shape of All My Sons. Yet by Death of a Salesman he was already alloying this formula with expressionistic elements, and in View from the Bridge, experimenting with a chorus. In other words, Miller was always trying out new possibilities and techniques. He rarely let the form determine the content (note the protracted length of Incident at Vichy or Some Kind of Love Story, both one-act plays), but let the shape fit what he had to say.

Why are these plays less well known?

The audiences for Miller’s first plays were his age and had been through many of the same experiences that he had—the Depression, World War II, the Cold War. By the 1960s and ’70s, the audiences were younger and more enthusiastic for theatrical experimentation. Brecht, Grotowski, the Theatre of the Absurd, collective creation were more appealing than Miller’s moral debates. The critical establishment, eager to embrace the fashionable, toppled older idols and were quick to condemn Miller’s new work. So they had short runs or no runs. They were not made into films. The same thing happened to Tennessee Williams.

The five playwrights in The Library of America

Mike Boehm, at the Los Angeles Times’s Culture Monster blog, notes the forthcoming Library of America boxed set of The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams and performs a quick calculus on the representation of playwrights in the series:

Out of more than 80 authors in the Library of America series (not counting anthologies), the only other playwrights are Eugene O’Neill, with three volumes totaling 3,203 pages, the Broadway plays of George S. Kaufman and his various collaborators (911 pages), Arthur Miller through 1961 (774 pages) and Thornton Wilder through 1943 (888 pages).

We are able to report that we're currently at work on the second volume of Arthur Miller’s plays, but Boehm asks:

Are there other American playwrights who ought to be honored with a volume in this series?

We do hope (and plan) to include more playwrights, but which dramatists do you think would make great additions to the series?

Arthur Miller writes The Misfits for his wife, Marilyn Monroe

Fifty years ago today United Artists released the most expensive black-and-white film made until that time. Arthur Miller wrote The Misfits, his first original screenplay, as a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, whom he had married four years earlier. Biographer Christopher Bigsby quotes Miller:

I would not have written it except for Marilyn. I wrote it for her. It was the only time I did write anything for an actor and, had I not known her, I would not have begun such a thing. She had lost a child in early pregnancy, which really upset her a lot, so it was a kind of a gift. It was also the expression of a kind of belief in her as an actress.

Miller and producer Frank Taylor assembled a dream team for the project. John Huston, who had directed Monroe’s breakthrough picture, The Asphalt Jungle, would direct, and her leading man would be Clark Gable, the screen idol of her youth. But the dream quickly dissolved. In Miller’s words: “By the time we got to make the film . . . we were no longer man and wife. The film was there but the marriage was not.” At one point Huston had to halt shooting to send Monroe to a rehab hospital.

The Misfits was the last movie for both Monroe and Gable. Two days after filming, Gable suffered a heart attack and died ten days later. While the box office was weak, some critics felt that Miller delivered his desired gift. Reviewing the movie for The Village Voice, Jonas Mekas wrote:

Marilyn Monroe, the Saint of the Nevada desert. . . She haunts you, you’ll not forget her . . . It is MM that tells the truth in the movie, who accuses, judges, reveals. And it is MM who runs into the middle of the desert and in her helplessness shouts: “You are all dead, you are all dead!”—in the most powerful image of the film—and one doesn’t know if she is saying those words to Gable and [Eli] Wallach or to the whole loveless world. . . There is so much truth in her little details, in her reactions to cruelty, to false manliness, nature, life, death, that she is overpowering, one of the most tragic and contemporary characters of modern cinema.

New Republic critic Stanley Kauffman was less enthusiastic, writing that Miller wasn’t able to escape the “dialectical dialogue” that was the bloodstream of his theatrical art: “these uncommonly loquacious Westerners almost seem to be competing for the girl by offering her their troubled souls.” Kaufman found Miller more “bemused [by Monroe’s character] than perceptive about her.”

It is something like a man becoming infatuated with an attractive but undistinguished girl and, out of a sense of guilt, investing her with qualities which the world simply doesn’t see.

Yet Monroe’s performance won her the 1962 Golden Globe for “World Film Favorite,” just five months before her death. During the filming Monroe bonded with her co-star, fellow drug user Montgomery Clift. It was one of his last films and he did not have fond memories of the shoot. At 1 a.m. on July 23, 1966, The Misfits was on television and Clift’s live-in personal secretary asked if he wanted to watch it. “Absolutely not,“ Clift replied and, because he suffered a fatal heart attack a few hours later, those were his last words.

Also of interest:

• Desert USA documents the filming of the movie in the Nevada desert
• The PBS website features a gallery of photos related to the Great Performances documentary Making the Misfits
• Read about Arthur Miller's collaboration with Elia Kazan on the productions of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman in a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA works: Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944–1961 (includes the novella based on the screenplay for The Misfits); American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now (includes reviews of The Misfits by Jonas Mekas and Stanley Kauffmann)

Kristallnacht in the writings of Arthur Miller and Philip Roth

The night of November 9, 1938, marks the beginning of the two days known as Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass.” As Sigrid Shultz reported in The Chicago Tribune the next day:

Systematic destruction of Jewish property, looting, arson, and wholesale arrests of Jews without official charges swept Germany today. It is estimated that 20,000 Jews were arrested in Germany and what was Austria.

The Nazi violence far outdid anything that happened along this line in Germany in the darkest days of the Red revolution. Then hungry mobs stormed food stores. Today the mobs gloated over the smashed stores of Jews. They helped themselves to clothes, furs, and toys, and scattered the goods in the streets for their friends to pick up.

Later reports estimated that 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, more than 200 synagogues burned down and 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed. Most historians date the beginning of the Holocaust from Kristallnacht and Jews worldwide memorialize the events every year.

Reimagining Kristallnacht has challenged writers since Günter Grass confronted the event with his harrowing novel The Tin Drum in 1959. Two American writers renowned for tackling difficult subjects waited until their seventies to try. In 1994 seventy-nine-year-old Arthur Miller wrote the play Broken Glass, in which the marital difficulties of a Jewish couple living in New York City in 1938 are inextricably entangled with the husband’s struggle with his identity as a Jew and his wife’s pathological reaction to news reports of Kristallnacht:

Hyman [a doctor]: Very disturbing. Forcing old men to scrub the sidewalks with toothbrushes. On the Kurfurstendamm, that’s equivalent to Fifth Avenue. Nothing but hoodlums in uniform.
Gellburg [the husband]: My wife is very upset about that.
Hyman: I know, that’s why I mention it. (Hesitates.) And how about you?
Gellburg: Of course, it’s a terrible thing. Why do you ask?
Hyman: (a smile)—I don’t know, I got the feeling she may be afraid she’s annoying you when she talks about such things.
Gellburg: Why? I don’t mind.—She said she’s annoying me?
Hyman: Not in so many words, but . . .
Gellburg: I can’t believe she’d say a thing like . . .
Hyman: Wait a minute, I didn’t say she said it . . .
Gellburg: She doesn’t annoy me, but what can be done about such things? The thing is, she doesn’t’ like to hear about the other side of it.
Hyman: What other side?
Gellburg: It’s no excuse for what’s happening over ther, but German Jews can be pretty . . . you know . . . (Pushes up his nose with his forefinger.)

Philip Roth was a spry seventy-one when he concocted The Plot Against America (2004), his alternate history of the war years. When Walter Winchell tours the country to speak out against President Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism, riots break out and American Jews experience their own Kristallnacht:

The worst and most widespread violence occurred in Detroit, the Midwestern headquarters of the “Radio Priest” Father Coughlin and his Jew-hating Christian Front . . . There, in the city’s biggest Jewish neighborhoods, shops were looted and windows broken, Jews trapped outdoors were set upon and beaten, and kerosene-soaked crosses were ignited on the lawns of the fancy houses along Chicago Boulevard and out front of the modest two-family dwellings of the housepainters, plumbers, butchers, bakers, junk dealers and grocers who lived on Webb and Tuxedo and in the little dirt yards of the poorest Jews on Pingry and Euclid.

Related LOA works: Reporting World War II: Part One: American Journalism 1938-1944 (includes Sigrid Schultz’s report on Kristallnacht); Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944-1961; Philip Roth: Collected Works 1959-1995

Elia Kazan, director of many of the most celebrated plays of the 20th century

Coinciding with Elia Kazan’s 101st birthday today is Martin Scorsese’s recent release of a new documentary, Letter to Elia, which will be screened at The New York Film Festival on September 27 and will air nationally on American Masters on PBS on October 4. The documentary focuses on classics by Kazan (Gentleman’s Agreement, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Face in the Crowd) that had a formative influence on Scorsese's own early work. Often less heralded are many stage hits directed by Kazan before he began making movies. Even after he was a successful filmmaker, Kazan frequently returned to New York to work with his favorite playwrights.

Kazan credits the scarcity of directors in New York during World War II for the career-making opportunity that fell his way in 1942. When he visited his draft board after the attack on Pearl Harbor Kazan discovered he was 3-A due to his age (32), his wife, and two kids. Shortly afterward, producer Michael Myerberg chose him to direct Thornton Wilder’s new play, The Skin of Our Teeth. Why him, Kazan wondered, and not Orson Welles or Jed Harris, director of Wilder’s previous success, Our Town. According to Kazan’s autobiography A Life, Myerberg had already assembled his cast of stars and needed a pliable young director. Kazan wanted the job but remembered, “this was the first play I directed that I found challenging beyond my talent and technique.” He was surprised to find the play “perfectly cast” with four established stars: Tallulah Bankhead, Frederic March, Florence March, and Florence Reed—and one star-to-be in Montgomery Clift. Managing Bankhead’s star-sized ego proved to be Kazan’s biggest challenge. He marks their epic shouting match the night before opening as the moment he discovered how to use his inner rage: “It was then that I became a director.”

Rave reviews vied with savage attacks to make Teeth “the play that most enlivened the state of drama” in 1942 according to Lewis Nichols in his year-end roundup for The New York Times.

Working with Arthur Miller in 1946 and 1947 on the original Broadway production of All My Sons taught Kazan how effective working directly with a playwright could be—and he adopted this approach going forward. The process worked: All My Sons ran for 328 performances and won Tony Awards for Miller as author and Kazan as director. Tennessee Williams was so impressed by the directing of All My Sons that he insisted to his agent and producer that Kazan direct his new play, A Streetcar Named Desire. Knowing this enabled Kazan to negotiate for 20% of the proceeds and the credit line, “Irene Selznick presents Elia Kazan’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire.”

The 1947 production of Streetcar is now legendary for introducing 23-year-old Marlon Brando to the world as the swaggering Stanley Kowalski. Kazan had been impressed with Brando’s work in a small part in a Maxwell Anderson drama he had produced the year before. He gave Brando twenty dollars to take a bus to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to read for Williams. Brando decided to use the money to eat, hitchhiked to Provincetown, and didn’t arrive until three days later—but the reading was a smash and Kazan records receiving “an ecstatic call from our author, in a voice near hysteria. Brando had overwhelmed him.” Jessica Tandy won the role of Blanche Du Bois when Kazan and Williams saw her in Los Angeles in Portrait of a Madonna, an earlier Williams play produced by her husband Hume Cronyn. “It was instantly apparent,” Williams wrote, “that Jessie was Blanche.”

Streetcar ran 855 performances. Jessica Tandy won the 1948 Tony Award for best actress and the play won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Considering the fame Streetcar brought him, Kazan is comparatively modest about his contribution to the play’s success in A Life:

There was no way to spoil Streetcar. No matter who directed it, with what concept, what cast, in what language, it was always hailed, often as “better than the original production.” What could I say to that? Bravo, Tennessee.

David Denby, in his review of A Life in The New York Review of Books thinks Kazan had exactly the mix of sensibilities to get the balance between Stanley and Blanche right:

In A Life, Kazan repeatedly deplores his own vacillating and compromising temperament, but perhaps this weakness added peculiar strengths to his skills as a director. Kazan could be sympathetic to both Stanley Kowalski’s brute appetite and Blanche Du Bois’s self-delusions perhaps because he saw both in his own character. A man of more coherent temper might not have understood the play so well.

Miller and Kazan had become close friends after the production of All My Sons. After Miller sent Kazan the script of Death of a Salesman in July, 1948 he wrote “I didn’t move from the phone for two days.” Kazan’s response was immediate: “Your play killed me.” He wanted to direct it that season. As Kazan wrote, “We understood each other immediately. I was for a time the perfect director for him and this showed most in Death of a Salesman, which is a play that dealt with experiences I knew well in my own life.” Yet, despite their affinity, they differed on the casting of Willy Loman. Miller envisioned Willy a small man. But Kazan knew Lee Cobb. They had been young actors together and, though Cobb at thirty-seven was twenty-five years younger than Willy, Kazan knew Cobb to be

a mass of contradictions: loving and hateful, anxious yet still supremely pleased with himself, smug but full of doubt, guilty and arrogant, fiercely competitive but very withdrawn, publicly private, suspicious but always reaching for trust, boastful with a modest air, begging for total acceptance no matter what he did to others. In other words, the part was him; I knew that Willy was in Cobb, there to be pulled out.

Death of a Salesman opened in February 1949, ran for 742 performances, and won six Tony Awards, including best author for Miller, best director for Kazan, and best supporting actor for Arthur Kennedy as Biff. The play also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949.

Kazan would go on to direct the original Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real in 1953 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955 with Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie and Burl Ives as Big Daddy (the play won another Pulitzer for Williams and Kazan got another Tony); Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959 with Geraldine Page, Paul Newman, and Rip Torn (Tonys for Kazan, Page, Torn), and the original production of Miller’s After the Fall (with Jason Robards and Barbara Loden) in 1964 at Lincoln Center.

Related LOA works: Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater; Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955; Arthur Miller: Collected Plays: 1944-1961