Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller 1915 and grew up in New York City.  Miller' father, owned a shop of women's coat; however, he lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929.  Miller was forced to work several jobs to support himself, including being a farm hand.  Miller began writing his plays in the 1930s.  He was a student at the University of Michigan but returned back to New York to write plays for the stage shortly after graduation.  Miller's plays were mainly focused around social and political issues.  

Miller wrote Act I of Death of a Salesman, within six weeks, he completed the rest of the play.  Death of a Salesman then appeared on Broadway in 1949 at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Kazan.  Miller's play Death of a Salesman won three Tony awards and the Pulitzer Prize which made Miller famous.  He wrote novels, essays and short stories and was one of the most recognizable playwrights in America.  Miller's works are known for their strong commitment to social justice, and their concern for the ordinary person, and the inner lives of their characters.  

Miller was married three times.  He married Mary Grace Slattery in 1940.  They had two children, Robert and Jane, before they got divorced in 1955.  Miller then married Marilyn Monroe in 1956.  They got a divorce in 1961, and in 1962 he married the photographer Inge Morath.  They have one cild, Rebecca Miller, who is an actress.  

In 2005, Miller died of congestive heart failure at his home in Connecticut at the age of 89.  The date of his death happened to be the 56th anniversary of the Broadway opening of "Death of a Salesman".

"As a dramatist, Miller had a lot in common with Ibsen, Shaw, Chekov, and Brecht.  What they share in common is the philosophy that the fate of a person is social and that the stage should be considered as a medium more important for ideas than for just entertainment.  Miller, however, is more of a moralist, and his plays have a serious intellectual purpose.  Miller focused on the expression of free ideas in the theatre, and also decided to write plays of social protest.  In the Death of a Salesman, Miller criticizes the falsity of the American Dream and the emphasis placed on financial success in the United States."

(http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Death_Of_A_Salesman_Summary/Death_Of_A_Salesman_Miller04.html

Tennessee Williams Blog

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi.  His family life was, what some would call, disastrous.  Williams was the second born, of three children.  His parents often fought and would engage in violent arguments that frightened his sister Rose.  In 1929, Williams saw one of Henrik Ibsen's prod

uctions and soon after decided he would become a playwright himself.  After Williams graduated, he moved to New Orleans and changed his name from Thomas Lanier Williams to "Tennessee Williams."  In 1944, one of his most well known plays, The Glass Menagerie, has an extremely successful show in Chicago and a year following made its way onto Broadway.  It was said that Tennessee used his own family relationships as an inspiration for the play.  "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life."  Williams struggled with depression throughout most of his life and lived with a fear that he thought he might one day go insane like his sister Rose.  During this battle in his life, he struggled with the addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol.  In 1983, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap in New York City.  

Tennessee Williams wrote twenty-five full length plays, produced dozens of short plays and screenplays, two novels, a novella, sixty short stories, over one-hundred poems and an autobiography.  Along with several other awards, he won two Pulitzer Prizes and four New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards.  

Williams Plays: Baby Doll & Tiger Tail, Battle of Angels, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Dragon Country: A Book of Plays, Eccentricities of a Nightingale, The Glass Menagerie, The Gnadiges Fraulein, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, I Rise in Flame Cried the Phoenix, Kingdom of Earth, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated, Night of the Iguana, Not About Nightingales, The Notebook of Trigorin, A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot, Period of Adjustment, The Red Devil Battery Sign, The Rose Tatoo, Small Craft Warnings, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, A Streetcar and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre.

Williams is known as a great playwright because of his creative use of literary teniques and his unique style.  In particular, Tennessee Williams' use of the literary techniques, imagery, and foreshadowing.  His use of these literary techniques give his audience an interesting, exciting and realistic play to follow.  However, "Williams is referring to a drama that was more than just a picture of reality: he insists that his ideal theatre make use of all the stage arts to generate a theatrical experience grater than just Realism.  From Glass Menagerie on, his plays are very theatrical.  His scenic descriptions draw on metaphors from the world of art and painting, and his use of sound and light is symbolic and evocative, not just realistic in its effects.  In several of Williams' plays, he consciously exploits non-realistic styles like expressionism, surrealism, and absurdism, which he calls upon playwrights to use in their search for truth.  Indeed, Williams's stage directions in the original script of Glass Menagerie called for decidedly plastic elements, including dozens of slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and dissolving and fading lighting.  In order to express his universal truths, Williams created what he termed plastic theater, a distinctive new styler of drama.  He insisted that setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects- all the elements of staging - must combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters, and language.

"http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2002/3kramer_print.htm

Bertolt Brecht Blog

Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898, in the city of Augsburg which is a section of the German Empire. His father was Catholic and worked in a paper factory, and his mother was a Protestant ill with breast cancer most of his younger years. While his mother was struggling with cancer, Brecht wasn't heathy himself, struggling with a congenital heart condition. He suffered a heart attack at the age of twelve but as soon as he recovered he continued strong with his education. Uniquely, Brecht was exposed at a young age to the German translation of the Bible. Due to his education of the German translation of the Bible, Brecht's work reflects some quotes and references to the Bible which can be found primarily in Mother Courage. By the age sixteen he was writing for a local newspaper and had written his first play. One of his plays reflects on his mothers illness and excessive sexual pleasures. Brecht himself, was known to have no less than three mistresses at a time. We have learned throughout his writings that his mother used to smell his clothing to determine the extent of his sexual activities. He is known to have experimented with homosexuality; however, he later pursued his first marriage with an opera singer named Marianne Zoff. He was obsessed with the idea of abandonment and left his wife and children at the age of thirty one. In 1933 Brecht took his family and traveled around the world escaping from Nazi rule. In 1950, Brecht and Weigel were given Australian citizenship, and in 1951 Brecht received the National Prize, first class. In addition, in 1954 he won the international Lenin Peace Prize. Aside from his family relationships, he spent most of his time studying Chinese, Japanese, and Indian theatre focusing a lot on Shakespeare. Brecht, however, died of a heart attack on August 14, 1956.

One of his finest works, Mother Courage and Her Children, was written during the early years of the Second World War and reflects on the "darker times". Brecht's influence was not only in the realm of political playwriting. He was also a theorist who introduced the concepts of Epic Theatre, "gestures". He opened up more possibilities of how the stage could be used and for what purpose. It is said, that Brecht was a wonderful poet and song writer as well, and was probably the closest equivalent to Shakespeare the rest of Europe has produced. Within theatre, Brecht took a revolutionary stance-not only towards class struggle, but also toward s his representation of realism on stage. "Brecht argued that Realistic theatre presented and reinforced a particular political vision, a view of society as the inevitable product of evolution and history, and therefore not susceptible to change. For Brecht, the realism of the time, which was based on bourgeois ideals and characters, was a biased representation of social reality." "Brecht stated that his theatre work is based on a "radical separation of the elements of production," (see alienation effect in the notes below) rather than the unity of action seen in Realism. This realistic illusion Brecht found to be dishonest, in that it seduced the audience to accept subliminally its representation of reality as a natural andapolitical view of the world. He wanted the audience to rethink and redefine its world view. By contrast to the Realistic theatre, Brecht's theatre always shows dramatic illusion in its characterisation, setting, action and techniques such as the alienation effect of using screens featuring captions to reveal the forthcoming action."

"His plays tend to be episodic, written as a seemingly disconnected, open-ended montage of scenes presented in a non-naturalistic, non-chronological way. The audience needs to arrive at its own conclusion of how the events are linked together."

"Brecht usually left the stage bare in his productions as a means of preventing the audience from experiencing a detailed illusion of reality, of some fictional dramatic location. He exposed stage machinery, opened up the physical staging to the wings and often exposed the back wall. He also exposed the lighting grid above the stage so the audience could see how lights influence the mood of the scene and influence the audience's judgment."

"Brecht also developed his own acting style for his work. He urged his actors not to empathise totally with their characters, but to stand outside them and illustrate their behaviour. Brecht's actors were asked to go beyond the Stanislavsky system of acting, where the actor identifies entirely with their character and represents the character entirely from his or her point of view. Rather Brecht encouraged a more demonstrative acting method, one that enables the actor topresent the character from a number of perspectives."

http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/drama/hsc/studies/brecht/2758/Brecht.htm#m2
This video below, tells a little about Bertolt Brecht's background.

Luigi Pirandello Blog

Luigi Pirandello was born into an upper-class family.  "He was an Italian short-story writer and novelist, a secondary school teacher, and finally a playwright".  In 1886 he began to work with his father in the sulphur mines of Porto Empedocle.  A year later, he moved to Rome to expand and continue his education and studies.  While in Rome, he had a conflict with his Latin professor and was forced to leave the University.  In 1891 he received his doctorate and joined a group of writer-journalists and within the group met Luigi Capuana, who encouraged him to dedicate himself to narrative writing.  In 1924, Pirandello became an important public figure  opening his own Art Theatre in Rome .  Pirandello supported fascism, and supported by Mussolini, his relationship to the dictator definitely kept the public talking.  Due to his wife's illness, Parandello has been greatly influenced, causing the themes of his plays to be mainly about madness, illusion and isolation . His play, Six Characters In Search Of An Author, marked the height of his career.  He was awarded the Noble Prize in 1934, and passed away shortly after in 1936.  Although no one will ever be exactly like Pirandello, his influence has been passed along to writers such as Beckett and Ionesco.  

Luigi Pirandello's play, Six Characters In Search Of An Author, is more than theory, it is a dramatization for the stage and for the novel. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dapmK1pavsY.

Quote:
Lee A. Jacobus, The Bedford Introduction to DRAMA, sixth edition.