"A Pointy Reckoning": Arthur Miller's Women

by Alisa Solomon

[John Proctor is the Villain opened on Broadway last Monday, the 14th, one of several new plays that provide a woman’s perspectives to the works of Arthur Miller like The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, and other iconic American dramas.  In American Theatre’s Spring 2025 issue (vol. 41, no. 3), theater journalist and professor Alisa Solomon presents “A Pointy Reckoning,” a look at these plays.  (Solomon’s article was also posted on the AT website as “The Revolt of Arthur Miller’s Women” on 8 April 2025.)]

A spate of new plays sticks up for the women in Arthur Miller’s iconic dramas.

They are among the most famous words spoken by a woman in a canonical American play: “Attention must be paid.” It’s Linda Loman, of course, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, admonishing her oldest son, Biff, to show his late father some respect. “He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog,” Linda insists. “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

[Death of a Salesman premièred at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway on 10 February 1949 and closed on 18 November 1950 after 742 performances. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, and starred Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, Howard Smith as Charley, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy. It was nominated for and won the Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Kennedy), Best Scenic Design (Jo Mielziner), Producer (Dramatic) (Kermit Bloomgarden and Walter Fried), Author, and Director, as well as the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play. Death of a Salesman has been revived on Broadway five times and has played around the world and in regional, community, and school theaters countless times. It’s also been adapted for films and television broadcasts.]

“Such a person” was understood in a number of ways when Salesman opened on Broadway in 1949. It could refer to an abstract “capitalized Human Being without being anyone, a suffering animal who commands helpless pity,” as Mary McCarthy [1912-89; novelist, critic, and political activist] put it, or a heroic striver playing by the rules yet beaten down by a punishing capitalist system, the hero of what Miller [1915-2005] called a tragedy of “the common man.”

One thing “such a person” absolutely didn’t mean then: a woman. On the contrary, for Miller, in order for a protagonist to confront a moral test within the social sphere, he had to be male. The main women in Salesman—and in Miller’s other most studied and produced play, The Crucible—are a dutiful, chore-laden wife (Linda Loman; Elizabeth Proctor) and a sexual temptress (the otherwise unnamed “Woman” with whom Willy has an affair; Abigail Williams). The issue isn’t that these characters are weak or unbelievable in their contexts. The problem is structural: The erotic lure of the Woman and of Abigail is what catalyzes the hero’s self-sacrificing downfall in both plays.

[After starting a try-out run at The Playhouse in Wilmington, Delaware, from 15 to 17 January 1953 (four performances), The Crucible débuted at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) on 22 January, starring Arthur Kennedy as John Proctor, E. G. Marshall as Rev. Hale, Beatrice Straight as Elizabeth Proctor, and Madeleine Sherwood as Abigail Williams. The production was produced by Kermit Bloomgarden and directed by Jed Harris. Miller felt that this production was too stylized and cold, and the reviews for it were largely hostile (although the New York Times noted “a powerful play [in a] driving performance”).

[On 22 June 1953, the production, with Miller assuming the directorship, opened with a new cast (including Marshall replacing Kennedy as Proctor and Maureen Stapleton in for Straight as Elizabeth Proctor), a simplified set and substituted curtains, and an added scene; the new production succeeded. Crucible won the 1953 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Featured Actress in a Play (Straight). The production closed on 11 July 1953 after 197 performances.]

Over the decades feminist critics and scholars too numerous to name have grappled productively with Miller’s reliance on the old madonna/whore dichotomy and with his narrow ideas of masculinity. More recently, though, it is playwrights who have been taking on the gender issues that Miller seemed oblivious to, as the Broadway marquee currently proclaiming John Proctor is the Villain makes plain. The play with that table-turning title, by Kimberly Belflower, is one of at least nine American works for the stage that fire feminist rejoinders to Miller. They too demand that attention must be paid, but reorient what—and to whom—it is due.

[John Proctor is the Villain was commissioned by The Farm Theater in Brooklyn, New York, for their College Collaboration Project and first workshopped in 2018 and 2019 in the theater departments of three colleges: Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

[The final version of the play was premièred by the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., from 27 April until 5 June 2022. A subsequent production was staged at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston from 8 February until 10 March 2024. John Proctor is the Villain opened at the Booth Theatre in New York City on 14 April 2025 and is scheduled to end its limited run on 6 July. The Broadway production is directed by Danya Taymor and stars Sadie Sink as the blunt-speaking deus ex machina, Shelby Holcomb.]

Different as these plays are from each other in form, tone, focus, and perspective, they all signal urgently through the sexist smog that has risen off these American classics in the nearly three-quarters of a century since they were written. Five of these new plays riff on The Crucible (1953) and three on Salesman (1949), and one [A Woman Among Women by Julia May Jonas; see below] takes inspiration from All My Sons (1946). Some frame the Miller work under scrutiny as a play-not-quite-within-the-play (Belflower’s play; Katie Forgette’s Mrs. Loman is Leaving; Sheri Wilner’s Kingdom City). Others take a sophisticated fan-fic tack by setting Miller’s characters in plots that come before, or after (Liz Duffy Adams’s Witch Hunt; Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman; Barbara Cassidy’s Mrs. Loman; Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor).

[All My Sons is a three-act play written in 1946. After tryouts at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut (9-11 January 1947), and the Colonial Theatre in Boston (13-27[?] January), it opened on Broadway at the Coronet Theatre on 29 January and closed on 8 November 1947, running for 328 performances. The production was produced by Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman, directed by Kazan, and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. It starred Ed Begley as Joe Keller, Beth Merrill as Kate Keller, Arthur Kennedy as Chris Keller, and Karl Malden as George Deever, and won both the Tony Award for Best Author and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play. The play was adapted for films in 1948 and 1987, and has had many revivals on Broadway, across the United States, and around the world.

[Mrs. Loman is Leaving premièred at Seattle, Washington’s ACT Contemporary Theatre from 12 to 27 October 2024. Kingdom City was developed at Launch Pad at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2010 and premièred at La Jolla Playhouse, on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, from 23 September to 5 October 2014. Witch Hunt was workshopped at PlayPenn New Plays Conference in 2012 (with a reading on 21 July) and premièred at the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (17-21 July 2013), under the title A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World (for a report on an earlier CATF, see “Contemporary American Theater Festival (2004)” [8 July 2015]).

[Wife of a Salesman had its world première at the Writers Theatre in Chicago in a co-production with the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre from 3 March through 3 April 2022; the Milwaukee Rep presentation ran there from 27 September to 6 November 2022. Mrs. Loman was workshopped from 5 to 20 November 2022 at The Tank in Manhattan, New York, and débuted on Off-Broadway’s Theatre Row at Theatre Five on 5-15 February 2025. The Good John Proctor had its world première by Bedlam theater company, performing at the Connelly Theater in New York City’s East Village, from 11 March to 1 April 2023.]

Some whirl into more fanciful forms that abstractly incorporate aspects of both approaches (Julia May Jonas’s A Woman Among Women; Sarah Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem). Miller has become especially ripe for such treatment in recent years for reasons that, like those that impel many of his protagonists, have to do with his reputation and with the ineluctable social forces that shape it. For one, his standing as a Classic American Playwright has been solidified for two generations. The critics who disparaged his plays as having “middlebrow” pretensions in the serious magazines of 1950s and ’60s—Eric Bentley [1916-2020], Robert Brustein [1927-2023], and Richard Gilman [1923-2006], among others—are no longer with us (neither, for that matter, are the theatre pages in the magazines that employed them). More significantly, the high/low culture distinctions they labored to uphold—with pretentious “midcult” art being the worst of all for trying to be at once hugely popular and artistically momentous—have evaporated into the postmodern ether. Nowadays, no one questions Miller’s place in America’s playwriting pantheon, even if we object to his disregard for women as potential tragic heroes. That Miller, more than Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953] or Tennessee Williams [1911-83], has also been widely regarded as a preeminent moral conscience among American dramatists, has been a further goad to the creative scrutiny of feminist playwrights.

[A Woman Among Women was developed through residencies at the North American Cultural Laboratory, The Jam at New Georges, and the Great Plains Theatre Conference. The play premièred from 15 October to 17 November 2024 at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, New York, in a coproduction with The Georges of Manhattan. Becky Nurse of Salem made its début at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California from 19 December 2019 to 29 January 2020; it later had its New York première at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater from 4-22 December 2022.]

Their countervailing plays emerged in the wake of political developments that not only spurred them on, but that surface overtly in their work. Take Ruhl’s mordant comedy, Becky Nurse of Salem, for instance. Set in 2016 in the infamous Massachusetts town, the play has as its title character the foul-mouthed, opioid-popping descendant of Rebecca Nurse, a midwife hanged for alleged witchcraft some 325 years earlier. Becky is struggling to make ends meet as she raises her teenage granddaughter. Frequently, she has to ask someone to turn down a TV blaring coverage of a Trump rally (“Lock her up! Lock her up!”). In a scene when Becky is arrested for trying, without a license, to correct the historical record by offering “The Real Tour of Salem,” the scene shifts (“bizarrely,” say the stage directions) to 1692, and Becky becomes Rebecca. A live crowd chants the same menacing words, denouncing her as a witch. Time periodically collapses and springs back in Ruhl’s play: Language, clothing, and customs change, but misogyny holds constant through the centuries.

These plays reflect, too, demands made by both the Black Lives Matter [launched in 2013] and #MeToo [launched in 2006; popularized as a hashtag in 2017] movements that Americans face up to shameful realities of our histories and to inequities that persist. Not that anyone is trying to topple Miller like a Confederate statue. Rather, the new plays resemble the contextualizing and additive materials that historians recommend placing around such monuments.

Like Becky, Adams’s, Monahon’s, and Belflower’s plays emend a factual inaccuracy in The Crucible, noting that Abigail was all of 11 years old at the time of the witch trials, and Proctor, 60—not, respectively, 17 and 30-something, as Miller deliberately rendered them to make Abigail the seductress of a male paragon of integrity. (Stacy Schiff’s [b. 1961] meticulous 2015 account of the Salem witch trials in her book, The Witches: Salem, 1692 [Little, Brown & Co., 2015], set the record straight.) In different ways, these writers call into question The Crucible’s inciting incident, Proctor’s “affair” with Abigail, and skewer the punishing patriarchal worldview of Puritan New England—and of Arthur Miller—that discredits, and often silences, women’s voices.

In her thriller Witch Hunt Or, A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, Adams picks up the story after the witch trials. Abigail, having fled Salem, returns to the region a decade later, seeking to understand why the town’s “high and powerful men” urged the girls on. “They had never listened to ones so low as us in their lives,” she says. “Now they killed people on our word.”

Setting The Good John Proctor in 1691, the year before Miller’s play is set, Monahon brings us into the dreams, drudgery, and degradations of Salem’s pubescent girls in a series of short, mystery-tinged, Caryl Churchill-like scenes. Abigail is 11 (and nonbinary), and her cousin, Betty, only 9. Using 21st-century language in a 17th-century world, Monahon connects the mistrust and exploitation of Salem’s girls to the suppression #MeToo sought to shake off.

The girls in John Proctor Is the Villain are high school students in a small town studying The Crucible in their English class and finding disturbing parallels between the old text and their own lives—rife, as they are, with creepy adult men and the adolescent upheaval of sexual feelings. Says one:

The thing this play is talking about is that pretty much all these girls had been like assaulted at some point. I mean like sexually. I read this book that says most of these girls probably had like PTSD which explains the like crazy physical fits that people thought were happening because of witchcraft but anyway so yeah like the assault stuff was everywhere. Their dads, older men in the town, stable boys, whoever . . . [.]

The reading-against-the-grain insights these students glean from The Crucible help bring local real-life abuses to light. The play culminates with the girls dancing in an ecstatic frenzy, reclaiming as feminist bonding and expression what had earlier been condemned as witchcraft.

Building dramatic action around studying or staging a Miller play provides several of the feminist playwrights opportunities for direct, even bald, commentary on the original. Forgette makes great use of this ploy in her hilarious backstage comedy, Mrs. Loman is Leaving, in which two aging actors are making their comebacks in Salesman. But there are offstage bumps: The man playing Willy is hallucinating as wildly as his character, while Joanne, the woman playing Linda, is falling apart after she learns, via text, shortly before curtain, that her husband is leaving her. Her grief and fury over her personal crisis commingle with Linda’s and color her challenge to the director’s encomiums about Willy.

I have to interrupt before you can spin out some half-baked explanation of why it’s okay for this bloviating mediocre man to treat a woman who has devoted her life to his every need. Why is she mending her stockings?! He gives stockings to his girlfriend! Where are Linda’s? WHERE ARE LINDA’S STOCKINGS!!!???

When the director retorts that Linda “represents the expectations and limitations of her gender for the time period. Women were helpmates. They supported their husbands,” Joanne replies, “That doesn’t mean that she didn’t have a personal dream of her own. What was Linda’s dream before she gave it up?”

In her sequel to Salesman, Cassidy takes up such questions, extending the psychological depth Miller grants his male characters to Linda. Mrs. Loman begins after Willy’s funeral, as Linda enrolls in college, develops a friendship with another woman who mysteriously knew Willy, and challenges her son, Happy, over his appalling misogyny. In a prequel, Wife of a Salesman, Burgess uses both strategies: She imagines Linda confronting the Woman, ahead of the moment in Miller’s plot when Biff learns of his father’s affair, potentially erasing its inciting incident. Later Burgess disrupts the action, revealing the whole thing as a play-within-the-play; the two actors performing “Wife” and “Mistress” comment on their roles and their own somewhat parallel lives.

Rather than parallel, Jonas’s characters in A Woman Among Women run aslant of Miller’s in All My Sons; of this new crop of Miller riffs, hers offers the most oblique response to the play that inspired it, as she explores his dramatic vision but swaps out his lenses for her own. All My Sons centers on a “man among men,” as Miller called Joe Keller, a respected businessman who secretly holds onto an incriminating lie to retain his stature. While reversing most of the characters’ genders and moving the action from a small Ohio town to famously multi-culti, queer-friendly Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonas borrows Miller’s backyard setting and other key elements: a central family with two grown children, one of whom is absent; a close-knit community of neighbors; high-stakes questions of moral responsibility; Aristotelian principles of tragedy.

In a note in the script, Jonas says she set out to discover what a “woman among women” might mean. Her answer not only emerges in the shape of an almost casual, fourth-wall-breaking style that features some quirky little songs. It also gives its hero, who runs a “wellness center for women,” a transgression less blatantly self-serving than Joe Keller’s—and, forsaking Miller’s certainty, a denouement that leaves everything in doubt.

It’s impossible to know what Miller himself might have made of these dramaturgical clapbacks. Forty years ago, when the Wooster Group incorporated a large chunk of The Crucible into L.S.D. (…Just the High Points), the troupe’s mash-up of a high-speed recitation of Miller’s text with passages from Timothy Leary’s [1920-96] treatise on the hallucinogen, he objected, and the show was eventually shut down. “Maybe at some point in the future,’’ Miller told The New York Times then, “the play will become a kind of public classic. But I’m still around and I should have a say about how the play is done as long as I am.”

[The New York-based experimental theater company Wooster Group morphed out The Performance Group (founded by Richard Schechner [b. 1934], Professor Emeritus at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and editor of TDR: The Drama Review, in 1967) from 1975 to 1980. Under artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte (b. 1944), it took its current name, derived from its address at 33 Wooster Street in SoHo, in 1980 but remained housed in the Performing Garage, a former metal-working factory.

[The troupe’s style is highly experimental, bending, mixing, and deconstructing genres and media, applying a lot of high-tech effects. Their performances often use familiar texts from the likes of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), and Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), which they usually reinterpret and subvert as raw ingredients.

[L.S.D. emerged over a period of collective development and workshopping in the mid-1980s. It was presented in October 1984 as a work-in-progress at The Performing Garage, then, from 22 March to 13 April 1984, Parts 1, 2, and 3 were performed, under the amended title L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .), at the Garage. On 15 April, Part 4 was added, and all four parts of L.S.D. were first performed in Boston, Massachusetts, through 13 May 1984. The play ran about 110 minutes in its complete form.

[From 27 September to 25 November 1984, L.S.D. was staged at The Performing Garage, during which run the Wooster Group received a cease-and-desist threat from Arthur Miller’s lawyers. The Group ceased performances of L.S.D. while actor-writer Michael Kirby (1931-97) wrote a new Part 2 (The Crucible section) and from 5 to 12 January 1985, L.S.D. reopened with the new version of Part 2.

[Over the next five years, the Wooster Group’s L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .) toured across the U.S. and around the world, returning to the Performing Garage in January and February 1987. It became Wooster Group’s most notorious performance piece.]

The plays are public classics now (some intellectual property restrictions notwithstanding), available to a robust playwriting tradition of theatrically talking back to canonical plays in a feminist register: Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters, Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (An Undoing), and Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief all transpose Shakespeare in this way. Such works shrewdly craft fresh stories from revered old ones to critically engage the past, the present, and the ways we construct the past in—and for—the present.

[Tracing the origins and production history of Lear’s Daughters, a “prequel” of Shakespeare’s play from the perspective of Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan, was confusing and uncertain as the record is elusive. It was commissioned in 1987 by the Women’s Theatre Group (renamed the Sphinx Theatre Company in 1999), one of the oldest women’s theater organizations in the United Kingdom, founded in 1973. Elaine Feinstein was brought in to write the dialogue with members of the collective, but the writing credits vary from listing (programs, posters, advertisements, publication) to listing.

[The script was first staged, it seems, on 12 September 1987, but whether that was in a London theater or on tour is unclear; in any case, the production went out on tour of the U.K. immediately and performed until 5 December.  There seems also to have been a staging at the Battersea Arts Center on 24 September 1987, but if it was a single showing or one of multiple performances is unknown.  Other tours followed in 1988 shortly after the first one. Revivals have been staged in recent years to mixed reviews.

[Macbeth (An Undoing), a retelling of the Shakespeare tale with Lady Macbeth at the center, premièred at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 4-25 February 2023. It transferred to the Rose Theatre, Kingston in London in 8-23 March 2024, and then Theatre for a New Audience, an Off-Broadway company in Brooklyn, New York, with the U.K. cast on 5-28 April 2024.

[Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, a reconfiguring of the Othello story from the women's point of view, premièred from 21 July to 9 August 1993 at the Bay Street Theatre, in Sag Harbor, New York, on Long Island. It moved Off-Broadway to the Circle Repertory Company in Greenwich Village from 27 October to 5 December 1993.]

One thing is certain. All nine of the feminist playwrights wrestling with their towering predecessor share one of Miller’s steadfast principles: that theatre matters, that it is the ideal sphere for examining social pressures, their fractures, and the impact they have on ordinary lives.

The word “feminist” does not appear on any of the 600 pages of Miller’s autobiography, Timebends [Grove Press, 1987]. Still, when he writes, “I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world,” he offers these new plays a full endorsement.

[Alisa Solomon (she/her), a dramaturg in New York City and a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is a long-time theater critic and general reporter for the Village Voice, Jewish Currents, The Nation, and the New York Times, among other publications.  Solomon has written two award-winning books: Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge, 1997) and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan Books, 2013).]