Adam and Evil

By T.E.K.

THE CREATION OF THE WORLD AND OTHER BUSINESS by ARTHUR MILLER

When a mature dramatist of international distinction writes a feeble, pointless play, a feeling of sadness and embarrassment clings to the event. Is it, one asks, a temporary lapse, or is it evidence of declining powers? Whichever it is, Arthur Miller has come a cropper in The Creation of the World and Other Business.

For the first two acts, the most conscientious playgoer will be hard put to discern any guiding purpose in the play. It follows the Book of Genesis straightforwardly, except for the injection of delicatessen humor. This is unfortunate on two counts. For one, Broadwayese does not mesh properly with the King James English that is inflectively present in the text. More important, Miller is leading from weakness; humor has never been his forte.

Cosmic Pater. By Act III, Adam and Eve have been expelled from the Garden of Eden and Miller gets to the point that he presumably wants to make. It concerns the slaying of Abel by Cain, seen as the harbinger of man's unbroken fratricide through all succeeding ages. In Miller's version, Lucifer incites Cain in the hope of establishing dominion over men on earth, comparable to God's rule in heaven. Thus man is in perpetual thrall to a power struggle between God and the Angel of Darkness, or to the conflicting forces of good and evil within himself.

The reasoning is somewhat muddled in that Lucifer has also been presented as a kind of Prometheus who wants to free men from God. The play is further clouded by Lucifer's suggestion that man, by his own will, has cut himself loose from the authority of both God and the Devil and is condemned to the lonely task of fashioning his own heaven and his own hell.

The cast does everything it possibly can to buoy things up. Stephen Elliott's God is a bull-roaring cosmic paterfamilias and Bob Dishy as Adam is playfully endearing as a man whose innocence has been tampered with. As Eve, Australian-born Zoe Caldwell suffers from an imperial sibilance in her delivery, which somehow implies that the Garden of Eden was the first British colony. George Grizzard's Lucifer is best of all, a celestial Richard III combining a ravenous appetite for power with silky glints of mischief.

No one who is remotely fond of drama would want Arthur Miller to stop writing plays, but it would have been a blessing if someone--either God or the Devil--had stopped him from indulging in Creation.

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