About Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller was born in Harlem in 1915 to a moderately wealthy family of Austrian Jewish roots who owned a successful clothing manufacturing business. When Miller was just a teenager, his family lost nearly everything in the stock market crash of 1929, and the family had to fire their chauffeur and household staff, and move from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn. Miller learned the value of hard work early on. He worked as a bread delivery boy in the mornings before school to help provide for his family, and also held several menial jobs to save money to put himself through college.
He enrolled at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1934, two years after high school graduation, as a journalism major. During spring break of his sophomore year, he penned his first play, No Villain, for which he won a $250 award from the school. His affinity for creative writing prompted him to switch majors, and he graduated with a BA in English, having completed two more stage plays, They Too Arise and Honors at Dawn. After graduation in 1938, he joined the Federal Theatre Project, where he began writing radio plays, but the next year, the government program was shut down. He was forced to take work as a shipfitter’s assistant in Brooklyn Navy Yard to make ends meet, but continued to write on his own.
The Man Who Had All the Luck
In 1940, Arthur Miller began work on a novel which was to be titled, The Man Who Had All the Luck. After the work was rejected by every publisher he had sent it too, he decided to try adapting the story into a play. In 1944, this work, which retained the same title, found its way into a literary compilation called: Cross Section: A Collection of New American Writing. From there the script found a producer and became the first of Miller’s plays to reach Broadway, where it premiered at the Forrest Theatre in November 1944. To Miller’s dismay, the production only lasted for four performances. Several critics had difficulty with Miller’s complicated plot. The New York Times, though acknowledging the play’s merit, felt that “[the playwright and director] have not edited out the confusion nor its somewhat jumbled philosophies,” while John Chapman of the New York Daily News posited that “[Miller’s] first offering tries a lot of things – too many by far – and most of them flop.” In response, Miller, personally stung, stated in a later interview that he almost “resolved never to write for theatre again.” Happily, Chapman’s review, went on to say, “and I now hope Mr. Miller will go right back to work writing another piece, for he has a sense of theatre and a real, if undeveloped, way of making stage characters talk and act human.” Miller, of course, did continue writing. His next work, All My Sons, premiered on Broadway three years later in 1947.
The Man Who Had All the Luck underwent extensive revisions between its initial publication in Cross Section and its Broadway premiere in November 1944. Unlike its published version, the production script of The Man Who Had All the Luck contains many of the archetypes for which Miller became known. One of the most important of these late changes involved turning the main character, David, into the brother and son of Amos and Pat, two of the secondary characters, and the exploration of the Father/Son relationship, which would, of course, go on to inspire many of Miller’s later works, including his next two plays, All My Sons, which earned him his first Tony Award, and Death of a Salesman, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and the New York Drama Circle Critics’ Award.
With the father/son relationship now considered one of the major recurring themes in Miller’s oeuvre, its omission from the published version of The Man Who Had All the Luck likely led to its dismissal by later readers – and producers – who only had wavering reviews on which to judge this seminal work. In fact this important change didn’t surface until the play was republished in 1989. Perhaps not surprisingly, the play received its first production since its original 1944 Broadway run in 1990 at the Bristol Old Vic in the UK. It has since had a handful of productions, most notably its return to Broadway in Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2002 revival starring Chris O’Donnell.
However, the success of these more recent productions is due not only to the newly realized inspiration The Man Who Had All the Luck has on Miller’s following works, but also to how the play has been presented. The original Broadway production was touted as a comedy about small-town America, not as the allegorical drama warning about the dangers of capitalism in American society, Miller intended it to be. He later stated that he strongly believed that although it had its flaws, the play’s dismissal was due in large part to this mistaken classification.
In addition, in 1944 the United States was in the midst of World War II. Patriotism was high and the audiences were looking to the theatre for decidedly optimistic messages. Theatre of social import had first come under scrutiny when the US entered World War I, with several writers of the 1910’s and 1920’s being accused of promoting Socialism. Similarly, in the advent of WWII, the Federal Theatre Project was shut down by the government amid fears that it may be used to promote Communism by its liberal playwrights. It was in this atmosphere that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! made its triumphant Broadway debut. A year and a half later, with Oklahoma! still running strong with its upbeat and pro-American theme, The Man Who Had All the Luck illustrated a markedly darker – and, for Broadway audiences of the time an unwelcome – side of American life.
Today: American Capitalism on the Stage
Fifty-eight years after its original production, the 2002 Roundabout revival of The Man Who Had All the Luck faced a very different social and political climate and a country ready to accept this somewhat bleak and complicated American fable. The nation was recovering from the aftermath of 9/11, and audiences had a much more cautious world view than they did nearly sixty years earlier. Coincidentally, Miller’s play was once again being shown as a stark contrast to Oklahoma!, which began previews for its fourth Broadway revival just two months earlier. This time, however, Bruce Weber of The New York Times called the uncertainty depicted in The Man Who Had All the Luck “poignant and prescient, and especially opposed to the bullheaded optimism of Oklahoma!, whose most comic character is a lovable peddler…who happens to be from the Middle East.” While still not a runaway hit, the production was apropos for a post-9/11 audience that could relate closely to insecurity and skepticism shown in Miller’s drama.
Arthur Miller is commonly viewed as one of America’s most prominent twentieth century playwrights. His popularity is documented by his lengthy career with thirty six stage plays and eight screenplays, with his last play opening shortly before his 89th birthday and only months before his death in 2005. His plays have been produced regularly on Broadway for over half a century, with his longest absence from the Great White Way since 1964 being a short four years. Miller is known for creating plays that reflect on important social and political issues through everyday characters and situations. Today, The Man Who Had All the Luck speaks to the skepticism of capitalism in America that was fueled by the financial crisis of 2008, epitomized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and continues today in the nation’s slow economic recovery. Arthur Miller’s ability to illustrate many ongoing societal problems through relatable and human characters that speak to many facets of American life across many generations gives plays such as The Man Who Had All the Luck an ongoing relevance to audiences today and likely well into the future.
