Category: people

Sixteen years after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill writer Salman Rushdie, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard reaffirmed the death call. “The day will come when they will punish the apostate Rushdie for his scandalous acts and insults against the Koran and the Prophet. The imam’s historic fatwa, issued in the days when the infidel leaders who champion liberal democracy and Zionism devoted all their energies to fighting Islam, is testament to Muslim greatness and the revolutionary dynamism of Koranic and Islamic thought.”

Terry Teachout was not an Arthur Miller fan. “He was, literally, pretentious: He pretended to have big ideas and the ability to express them with a touch of poetry, when in fact he had neither. His final play, “Finishing the Picture,” was yet another rehash of the Monroe-Miller ménage in which he resorted one last time to what I referred to in this space last fall as “pseudo-poetic burble” (“What we had that was alive and crazy has been pounded into some hateful, ordinary dust”).”

“At age 62, Meredith Monk has 40 years of category-defying works that combine film, choreography, and voice-based tapestries that traffic in life-defining experiences. Her simplicity of musical means suggests, in the words of one critic, folk music for a civilization that hasn’t been invented yet. (Her detractors compare her music to high-toned commercials for Meow Mix.)”

Arthur Miller had such an influence on the world that it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve seen his plays. “That’s the thing about great works of art: We can’t imagine a time before they existed, before certain phrases and ideas were part of the very air we breathed. And thus even if you’ve never seen “Death of a Salesman” or haven’t read “The Crucible” since high school — you’re still influenced by Arthur Miller, who died Thursday at age 89. The world is so suffused with the wisdom of those plays, with their indispensability, that we can’t envision somebody actually sitting down and writing them, line by line, and cursing and wadding up sheets of paper and trying again.”

“Arthur Miller may or may not be the greatest playwright America has produced – Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams both have equal, if not more, claim to that phantom title – but he is certainly the most American of the country’s greatest playwrights. He was the moralist of the three, and America, as some recent pollsters rushed to remind us, is a country that likes moralists. The irony, of course, is that Mr. Miller’s strongest plays are fired by convictions that assail some of the central ideals enshrined in American culture.”

It may seem de rigeur today for playwrights to tackle big sociological issues in a direct manner, but when Arthur Miller burst upon the scene, such forays into national self-examination were hardly theatrical comfort food for audiences used to droll comedies and “classic” drama. And yet, Miller’s work succeeded with the public because of his innate ability to make grand theoretical debates deeply personal. “He loved and even ennobled the little guy, with all of — and because of — his flaws. In works tackling the loftiest subjects, he touched nerves so deep, it was as if the plays were customized arrows, aimed at the unique contours of each theatergoer’s heart.”

Arthur Miller’s contemporaries in the theatre world remember him as a man of principle, of deep intellectual curiosity, and possessed of an immense talent for observing the human condition through prose. “He was absolutely charming. He was cast-iron… You would say how are you and for the next fifteen minutes you could sit back and enjoy and wonderful reply.”

Garry Trudeau, creator of the popular and controversial Doonesbury comic, suffered a broken drawing arm this past week when he was tackled by a ski instructor to prevent him from skiing into a tree. Trudeau was in Aspen to accept the Freedom of Speech award at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. He could be unable to draw the strip for six to eight weeks.

Arthur Miller, one of the 20th Century’s greatest playwrights, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 89. The cause was congestive heart failure.

Playwright Arthur Miller, 89, is battling cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition and is in hospital. Miller, a fiery moralist whose plays include “Death of a Salesman,” “The Crucible” and “A View from the Bridge,” had been in hospice care at Copeland’s New York apartment since his release several weeks ago from Memorial Sloan-Kettering.