After the Fall

Quentin, a lawyer, reflects on his two marriages and his current relationship through a running inner monologue throughout the play. It’s a painfully biographical piece, one that mirrors the playwright’s own life. It chronicles the main character's life as her falls in love with a young woman, his marriage ends, and he gets remarried to the young woman who has now become an international star and sex symbol.

The second wife, Maggie, is incredibly troubled, insecure, and jealous. She has a drinking and drug problem and is an obvious parallel for Marilyn Monroe. Their relationship is doomed from the start. They are unhappy together because they can't trust each other.

BOTTOM LINE: The play is so heartbreakingly raw and intimate. Miller show more was working through his own marriage in this play, and that truthfulness adds a layer of depth that fiction often can’t reach. Not an easy play to read, but very real look at the ways we can harm the people we love the most.

“I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that's the truth of roses, isn't it? — The perfume?” show less

Quentin is a lawyer at a big firm. He has friends, a wife, daughter and a Communist past he is still trying to come to terms with. He constantly flashbacks to his childhood to hear his parents bickering and flashes forward to listen to his current lover discuss her fear of Nazis. In between we see Quentin's first marriage end, the disintegration of his second marriage to a famous singer, and the fear he and his friends feel when the firm demands that someone names the former Communists among them.
When I began reading this I was aware that Miller had caught a tremendous amount of heat for this play. I can see why. It is self-serving and egotistical in monumental proportions. He might as well have gone ahead and given the characters their show more real names: Quentin is Miller whining endlessly about truth, Maggie is Marilyn Monroe as the "quite stupid, silly kid." And the later lover, calm Holga, is Miller's then wife, Ingeborg Morath, the only female in the play that Miller doesn't portray as impossible to please. If Miller had simply written a play that had a little bit in common with his own life it wouldn't have mattered, but that he chose to write so transparently about his marriage, break-up and death of Marilyn so immediately after her death comes off as exploitation. show less

This play feels like an extended psychotherapy session on Arthur Miller’s relationship with women and his parents and the anxiety of the McCarthy era. It is baldly autobiographical. It is abstract, experimental, far from the well-made-play form Miller excelled in. Audiences can avoid it. Fans of Marilyn Monroe, and McCarthy era history buffs will find it interesting for its content. Such broken, imperfect works aren't very useful when you’re searching for effective dramaturgy.

So, Maggie wasn't based on Marilyn Monroe, huh, Arthur? Liar! I didn't like this one at first ... the disjointed flash-back type play never held as much charm for me as a real-story type play. But it grew on me. Miller's writing truly approaches genius. There is something truly theatrical without being pretentious. Apparently, most playwrights can't pull this off, at least the ones I've read. This play follows a middle-aged man as he explores the failure of his personal relationships and his fear of intimacy ... at least that's my take.

More Theater of the Absurd. A very surreal play -- non-linear. A bit difficult to follow but once I got going it got easier.

after learning more about Miller's life, the book became more interesting to me. He writes beautifully, and this book contains some of my favorite sayings.

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