Teachout: Not Liking Arthur Miller

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”).”