THEATER, ETC.
285
man husband.)
As
for its political ideas, where politics has not yet been
softened up by psychiatric charity, Miller still writes on the level of a
left-wing newspaper cartoon. (To pass muster at all, Quentin's young
German girlfriend-this in the mid-1950's!-has to turn out to have
been a courier for the 20th of July officers' plot; "they were all hanged,"
Quentin's political bravery is demonstrated by his triumphantly inter–
rupting the harangue of the chairman of the House UnAmerican Activi–
ties Committee to ask, "How many Negroes do you allow to vote in your
patriotic district?" This intellectual weak-mindedness of
After the Fall
leads, as it always does, to moral dishonesty.
After the Fall
claims to be
nothing less than modern man taking inventory of his humanity-asking
where he is guilty, where innocent, where responsible. What I find
objectionable is not the peculiar conjunction of issues, apparently the
exemplary issues of the mid-twentieth century (Communism, Marilyn
Monroe, the Nazi extermination camps) which Quentin, this writer
manque
pretending throughout the play to be a lawyer, has recapitulated
in his own person. I object to the fact that in
After the Fall
all these issues
are on the same level- not unexpectedly, since they are all in the mind
of Quentin. The shapely corpse of Maggie-Marilyn Monroe sprawls on
the stage throughout long stretches of the play in which she has no part.
In the same spirit a raggedy oblong made of plaster and barbed wire-----–
it represents the concentration camps, I hasten to explain-remains
suspended high at the back of the stage, occasionally lit by a spot when
Quentin's monologue swings back to Nazis, etc.
After the Fall's
quasi–
psychiatric approach to guilt and responsibility elevates personal trag–
edies, and demeans public ones-to the same dead level. Somehow–
staggering impertinence!-it all seems pretty much the same: whether
Quentin is responsible for the deterioration and suicide of Maggie,
and whether he (modern man) is responsible for the unimaginable
atrocities of the concentration camps.
Putting the story inside Quentin's head has, in effect, allowed
Miller
to
short-circuit any serious exploration of his material, though he
obviously thought this device would "deepen" his story. Real events
become the ornaments and intermittent fevers of consciousness. The
play is peculiarly loose-jointed, repetitive, indirect. The "scenes" go
on and off-jumping back and forth from Quentin's first marriage, his
second marriage (to Maggie-Marilyn) , his indecisive courtship of his
German wife-to-he, his childhood, the quarrels .of his hysterical op–
pressive parents, his agonizing decision to defend an ex-Communist
law school teacher and friend against a friend who has "named
names." All "scenes" are fragments, pushed out of Quentin's mind when
