Torn Apart and Pulled Together the American Clock

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The hearth dominates American playwriting. Of the nation's foremost dramatists -- the likes of Thornton Wilder, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and the early Edward Albee -- only Arthur Miller has consistently reached out beyond domestic grief to comment on public life. For that aspiration, Miller has often been rebuked and advised to return to family melodrama. Probably no rejection hurt more than the fate of his The American Clock, a poignant panorama of what the 1930s did to the country's psyche; it opened on Broadway in November 1980 and lasted barely two weeks. Miller has not brought a new play there since.

In 1984 Miller rewrote the show, and last week Britain's National Theater gave it a handsomely designed, intelligently acted and altogether persuasive production -- not a revival, because in content, style and spirit this Clock amounts to new work. It is a robust, expressionistic celebration of a time that tore America apart yet paradoxically brought it together, an all but unique moment when millions of individual experiences coalesced into a collective national experience.

To reinvigorate the text, Miller and Director Peter Wood have gone back to its beginnings. The inspiration for the piece, Miller acknowledges, was Studs Terkel's sprawling oral history Hard Times. But during pre-Broadway workshops and a Charleston, S.C., tryout, Miller was repeatedly counseled by critics to shift emphasis from a documentary-style montage of vignettes to a focus on a particular family, resembling his own, whose growing deprivation and humiliation reflected the Depression in microcosm. These semiautobiographical characters proved unable by themselves to bear the weight of enormous events; meanwhile, the play's sweep had been diminished, and the tinkering, especially the search for jokes, had drained Clock of guts and vitality.

The London production's metaphoric intentions are evident the moment the audience sees the backdrop. A lurid, scrawled red line divides a vista of white-capped mountains and a blue sky with clouds from a rough black collage below, inset with garbage cans, pails, tires and a metal ladder -- the dregs beneath the American Dream. Superimposed are slides announcing the year as the play moves forward from the Crash into World War II and briefly into 1968 and beyond. The cast of 19 enact dozens of the dispossessed, from a desperate Southern sheriff no longer receiving a paycheck to college boys afraid to graduate into an unwelcoming world, from a ruined multimillionaire to a scrounging hobo. These are often archetypes, but just as often their circumstances have been drawn from historical record. The documentary aura is heightened by two dozen popular songs ironically interposed (The Joint Is Jumpin', How Long Blues, Sittin' Around).

In the second act, where the Broadway version bogged down in depiction of the family's fate, the narrative confidently shifts into analysis of the American character -- the need for belief and common purpose and even catastrophe to shake people out of self-absorption. As Lee Baum, the author's surrogate, Neil Daglish is touching, introspective and believably American. But the play's most convincing voice is Miller's, admonishing us: "There has never been a society that hasn't had a clock running on it." His American Clock records harrowing midnights and piteously false dawns.