The Crucible - Arthur Miller - Episode 1 - Witch Hunts In Two Centuries! - Pulitzer Prizes! - Allegories Everywhere!

The Crucible - Arthur Miller - Episode 1 - Witch Hunts In Two Centuries - Pulitzer Prizes - Allegories Everywhere!

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.

I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit podcast. Today is new book day, and I always love new book day. We are starting our series on Arthur Miller and his timeless classic about human hysteria, The Crucible. I’m particularly excited about this series because it’s both extremely historical as well as psychological, as lots of things are- but in this case- it’s heightened.

For sure, The Crucible is Arthur Miller’s most produced play worldwide becoming one of America’s most popular plays in the 20th century. Ironically, it failed at the box office in its initial production in 1953, so what does that tell you?

Initial box offices don’t always get it right.

Miller would say, almost never. He was very critical to how we organize theater in this country. I watched an interview he did with Charlie Rose later in his life and he talked about the problems he saw with American theater. It was kind of interesting to me. He complained that, as a nation, we could never get good at play writing and acting because of the financing piece. He wished we had a national theater- I’m not saying I advocate for that idea, because I can see a lot of problems in other ways- but he did make an interesting point. He made the analogy that if you took another profession, like plumbing or something, for example you create a plumbing company and hire people to be professional plumbers- they would have security and work continuously- finishing one starting another- seamlessly- and with each new job, they would learn to perfect their craft- obviously getting better and better all the time and the trade itself would progress in technique and so forth. He said today, our theater does things by the job- and he said it would be like the plumbing company going out and hirng new plumbers every time they have a different job to do, and in the between time the plumbers are out of work doing something else, getting out of practice with no time or incentive to work on things that would have a long term improvements. He says, this financial piece keeps actors from getting better, play writes from getting better, and theaters from taking chances on things that might take more than one week to get popular. He said, doing theater project by project makes that initial box office too important because the immediate return on investment is too high. But anyway, I hadn’t thought of it like that. Maybe he’s right. There’s certainly quite a bit of sequels and redundancy in the movie industry.

That is one great thing about researching a person who only died in 2005- which is when Miller died. He was born in 1915 and lived until 2005- there is a lot of video footage of him, especially with his second wife, Marilyn Monroe.

Oh my gosh, I know and I guess this is a good of time as any to get into a little bit of the facts about his personal and professional life, although we won’t spend too much time on that today. We can get into the Marilyn Monroe stuff when we talk about the Mccarthy era stuff. But for starters, Miller was a native New Yorker, originally from a well to do family who owned a manufacturing company. Unfortunately, during the depression, his family went bankrupt and to the poor house they all went, not an uncommon depression era story inAmerica. One fun fact about Miller’s early life for all your burgeoning students out there is that- Miller was a terrible student, which is something I always find interesting. He failed Algebra three time.

So there you go- there’s hope for us all- even the non-mathematical types.

For sure, it took him two years to raise enough money to pay for his college tuition, but He did finally go to a great school- the University of Michigan- all you Blue fans out there- (if you’re not from the US, Michigan is famous not only because it’s a prestigious university but their American football team is very good- although not as good as their SEC counterparts – if you ask me!

HA!! Well, they likely could have beat the University of Tennessee this year.

Ouch- why would you say something like that??

For those who don’t know, Christy and I are big football fans and Christy’s daughters both attend the University of Tennessee which also is a big and good school with a very historically important football team- although not so much recently. Football rivalries never die! Her best friend’s husband attended the University of Michigan- so she has a little personal vendetta!! Anyway, it was at the University of Michigan that Miller started writing drama. By 1947, he was lucky enough, fortunate to use a Machiavellian phrase- to have a play open on Broadway. The name of that play was All My Sons. It was an immediate hit- an...