Searing Lines From 5 Arthur Miller Plays

Arthur Miller once wrote that, when he was young, he “imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do.” Miller himself wrote many worthy plays, perhaps most famously Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, which helped establish him as one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century.

For Miller, plays offered an intriguing way to ponder difficult questions about life and the ways we choose to live — questions about responsibility and morality, guilt and denial, good and evil. By contemplating such things, Miller believed we could come closer to finding the answers and to forming a happier, more equitable society. “The mission of the theater, after all,” he said, “is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.”

Here are some of the most thought-provoking quotes from five of Arthur Miller’s best-known plays.

"All My Sons"

Directed by Elia Kazan (Miller’s friend and frequent collaborator), All My Sons was Arthur Miller’s first success. The three-act play opened on Broadway in 1947 and was an immediate hit with audiences and critics — which, according to Miller, “made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more.”

The play tells the story of Joe Keller, the owner of a munitions factory who is charged with shipping defective aircraft engines during World War II. Joe is exonerated, but his partner is convicted, inciting the play’s exploration of shame, denial, loyalty, and guilt. All My Sons also critiques the military-industrial complex and the American dream, which, in part, led to Miller being called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s.

“Death of a Salesman”

Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway in 1949. A two-act tragedy, it remains Miller’s most famous work and is widely regarded as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. The play uses a montage of memories, dreams, and conflicts to tell the story of the Loman family, particularly Willy Loman, an aging traveling salesman increasingly haunted by the realities of life.

The family members symbolically represent various ideas of what it meant to be happy and successful in postwar America. Miller himself described the play as “the tragedy of a man who gave his life, or sold it” in pursuit of the American dream.

“The Crucible”

Set during the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, The Crucible is Miller’s allegory for McCarthyism and the paranoia surrounding the supposed internal threat of communism in 1950s America. In the play, a local minister catches a group of girls dancing naked in the forest, apparently partaking in some kind of pagan ritual. This triggers a communal outburst of dark suspicions, hidden agendas, and hasty, ill-informed judgments.

Miller, himself a victim of McCarthyism and the “Red Scare,” wrote that The Crucible — first performed on Broadway in 1953 — was “an act of desperation” in the face of what he called “terribly serious insanity.”

“A View From the Bridge”

A View From the Bridge, first staged in 1955, tells the story of Eddie Carbone, a Brooklyn longshoreman whose obsessive and improper love for his wife’s orphaned niece ultimately brings about his own destruction. Set in a close-knit Italian American community in the 1950s, the play’s events explore themes such as love and desire, justice and the law, and the concepts of honor and respect.

Like other Miller works, the play is also a political allegory for McCarthyism. Carbone is a tragic character who, like Miller, was asked to name names — to become an informer and a “rat.” Unlike Carbone, however, Miller stood firm, and A View From the Bridge serves as a forceful condemnation of the McCarthy hearings and those who offered up the names of innocent people.

“Incident at Vichy”

With Incident at Vichy, written in 1964, Miller turned his focus to Nazi Germany, portraying the fictional events surrounding a group of men detained in Vichy France in 1942. The play examines how the Nazis were able to perpetrate the Holocaust with so little resistance, and explores the subjects of human nature, guilt, fear, and complicity.

At its heart, the play is about how good and evil exist not as polar opposites, but as a spectrum. In an essay about the play, Miller wrote, “It was not to set forth a hero, either as a fact of history or as an example for us now, that I wrote this play but to throw some light on evil. The good and the evil are not compartments but two elements of a transaction.”

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