Cry From The Heart

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Arthur Miller is the American Ibsen, a gifted domestic dramatist who instead prefers political crusading, onstage and off. He and his characters have seemed to inhabit a world of clear-cut right and wrong. This personal history gives poignant impact to Miller's new one-acts, collectively titled Danger: Memory!, at New York City's Lincoln Center. One is a kitchen slice of life between elderly friends, the other a charged and almost surreal interview between a hostile police detective and the father of a murder victim. What links them is a parallel revelation: in each, a man about Miller's age admits that after basing his life on progressive principles, he is no longer sure these tenets do the world any good. Taken together, the plays amount to a cry from the heart for lost certitude. They lack the accusatory force that empowered Miller's plays in the '40s and '50s. But they also shed the naivete that has marked nearly all of his writing, and their contemplative voice is well worth hearing. W.A.H. III