| After the Fall | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Written by | Arthur Miller |
| Characters |
|
| Date premiered | January 23, 1964 |
| Place premiered | ANTA Washington Square Theatre |
| Original language | English |
| Setting | New York |
After the Fall is a play by the American dramatist Arthur Miller.
| After the Fall | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Written by | Arthur Miller |
| Characters |
|
| Date premiered | January 23, 1964 |
| Place premiered | ANTA Washington Square Theatre |
| Original language | English |
| Setting | New York |
After the Fall is a play by the American dramatist Arthur Miller.
The play premiered on Broadway at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre on January 23, 1964, and closed on May 29, 1964 after 208 performances. Directed by Elia Kazan, who collaborated with Miller on the script, the cast starred Barbara Loden as Maggie and Jason Robards Jr. as Quentin, along with Ralph Meeker as Mickey, [1] Salome Jens as Holga, and an early appearance by Faye Dunaway as Nurse. [2]
Barbara Loden, who would become Kazan's wife in 1967, won the 1964 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and Jason Robards was nominated for the 1964 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. [2]
In 1984, the play was revived Off-Broadway at Playhouse 91, where it ran from October 4 to December 2 that year. Directed by John Tillinger, the cast starred Frank Langella and Dianne Wiest. [3] [4]
In 2004, the play was revived on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre in a Roundabout Theatre Company production from June 25 (previews) to September 12 that year. Directed by Michael Mayer, the cast starred Peter Krause and Carla Gugino. [5] The play was nominated for the 2005 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design of a Play (Richard Hoover). [6]
 | This section needs additional citations for verification .(December 2016) |
After the Fall, one of Miller's more personal plays, is a thinly veiled personal critique centered on Miller's recent divorce from Marilyn Monroe: the plot takes place inside the mind of Quentin, a New York City Jewish intellectual who decides to reexamine his life, in order to determine whether or not he should marry his most recent love, Holga.
The play has been roundly criticised by some for being too similar to Miller's actual life because Maggie's suicide is similar to the accidental overdose death of Miller's former wife, Monroe. The feelings of the protagonist, Quentin, are often believed to be Miller's own reflections about his failed marriage.[ citation needed ]
For example, according to Sarah Bradford, in her biography America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, “Jackie, who had admired Arthur Miller enough to seat him at her table at the Malraux dinner, turned on him for his betrayal of Marilyn in his play After the Fall, which opened in New York on January 23, 1964. For [Jackie Kennedy] loyalty was the ultimate test of character, and in portraying Marilyn as a self-destructive slut whom he had abandoned for her own good, Miller had dismally failed it.” [7]
The play remains one of Miller's less popular works, attributed in part to the non-linear, often surrealistic nature of the plot and setting; all but the initial and final seconds of the play take place in the protagonist's brain, which is reflected by a set comprising a single chair before a concentration camp guard tower, which is surrounded by a giant, winding ramp made up of crevices, pits, and abutments. The plot unfolds over a period of time, and due to the non-linear nature of the story, characters and occurrences appear as the protagonist remembers them. Reflecting the nature of the mind, they often disappear and their stories remain unresolved until later in the play, when they spontaneously reappear again.
Frank Rich noted: "Quentin is a witness to alarming public and personal catastrophes: the stock market crash, the Holocaust, the McCarthy witchhunts and the self-destruction of a show business idol to whom he is married." [3]
A television production of the play was shown in December 1974 on NBC. It starred Faye Dunaway, Christopher Plummer, Bibi Andersson, and a young Brooke Shields, and was directed by Gilbert Cates. Arthur Miller wrote the teleplay based upon his original stage play. [8] [9] [10]
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). He wrote several screenplays, including The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.
Henry Warren Beatty is an American actor and filmmaker. His career has spanned over six decades, and he has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award and three Golden Globe Awards. He also received the Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1999, the BAFTA Fellowship in 2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2007, and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2008.
Dorothy Faye Dunaway is an American actress. She is the recipient of many accolades, including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award. In 2011, the government of France made her an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Anne Bancroft was an American actress. Respected for her acting prowess and versatility, Bancroft received an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two Tony Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Cannes Film Festival Award. She is one of only 24 thespians to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting.
Jason Nelson Robards Jr. was an American actor. Known as an interpreter of the works of playwright Eugene O'Neill, Robards received two Academy Awards, a Tony Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor. He is one of 24 performers to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting.
Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was a Canadian actor. His career spanned seven decades, gaining him recognition for his performances in film, stage, and television. He received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, two Tony Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards, making him the only Canadian recipient of the "Triple Crown of Acting". He also received a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award as well as a nomination for a Grammy Award.
Peter William Krause is an American actor, director, and producer. He has played lead roles in multiple television series, portraying Casey McCall on Sports Night (1998–2000), Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under (2001–2005), Nick George on Dirty Sexy Money (2007–2009), Adam Braverman on Parenthood (2010–2015), Benjamin Jones on The Catch (2016–2017), and Bobby Nash on 9-1-1 (2018–2023).
All My Sons is a three-act play written in 1946 by Arthur Miller. It opened on Broadway at the Coronet Theatre in New York City on January 29, 1947, closed on November 8, 1947, and ran for 328 performances. It was directed by Elia Kazan, produced by Kazan and Harold Clurman, and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. It starred Ed Begley, Beth Merrill, Arthur Kennedy, and Karl Malden and won both the Tony Award for Best Author and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play. The play was adapted for films in 1948 and 1987.
A View from the Bridge is a play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It was first staged on September 29, 1955, as a one-act verse drama with A Memory of Two Mondays at the Coronet Theatre on Broadway. The run was unsuccessful, and Miller subsequently revised and extended the play to contain two acts; this version is the one with which audiences are most familiar. The two-act version premiered in the New Watergate theatre club in London's West End under the direction of Peter Brook on October 11, 1956.
Sam Prideaux Robards is an American actor. He is best known for his film roles in American Beauty (1999) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). For his performance in the Broadway production of The Man Who Had All the Luck, he received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play.
Carla Gugino is an American actress. After early roles in the films Troop Beverly Hills (1989), This Boy's Life (1993), Son in Law (1993), and Snake Eyes (1998), Gugino received wider recognition for her starring roles in the Spy Kids trilogy (2001–2003), Sin City (2005), Night at the Museum (2006), American Gangster (2007), Righteous Kill (2008), Race to Witch Mountain (2009), Sally Jupiter in Watchmen (2009), Sucker Punch (2011), Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011), San Andreas (2015), Gerald's Game (2017), and Gunpowder Milkshake (2021).
Ralph Meeker was an American film, stage, and television actor. He first rose to prominence for his roles in the Broadway productions of Mister Roberts (1948–1951) and Picnic (1953), the former of which earned him a Theatre World Award for his performance. In film, Meeker is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich's 1955 Kiss Me Deadly.
Barbara Ann Loden was an American actress and director of film and theater. Richard Brody of The New Yorker described Loden as the "female counterpart to John Cassavetes".
The Price is a two-act play written in 1967 by Arthur Miller. It is about family dynamics, the price of furniture and the price of one's decisions. The play premiered on Broadway in 1968, and has been revived four times on Broadway. It was nominated for two 1968 Tony Awards.
Master Class is a 1995 play by American playwright Terrence McNally, presented as a fictional master class by opera singer Maria Callas near the end of her life, in the 1970s. The play features incidental vocal music by Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, and Vincenzo Bellini. The play opened on Broadway in 1995, with stars Zoe Caldwell and Audra McDonald winning Tony Awards.
Hughie is a short two-character play by Eugene O'Neill set in the lobby of a small hotel on a West Side street in Midtown Manhattan, New York, during the summer of 1928. The play is essentially a long monologue delivered by a small-time hustler named Erie Smith to the hotel's new night clerk Charlie Hughes, lamenting how Smith's luck has gone bad since the death of Hughie, Hughes' predecessor. O'Neill wrote Hughie in 1942, although it did not receive its world premiere until 1958, when it was staged in Sweden at the Royal Dramatic Theatre with Bengt Eklund as Erie Smith. It was first staged in English at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 1963 with Burgess Meredith as Erie.
Zoe Swicord Kazan is an American actress and screenwriter. She made her acting debut in the film Swordswallowers and Thin Men (2003) and later appeared in films such as The Savages (2007), Revolutionary Road (2008), and It's Complicated (2009). She starred in Happythankyoumoreplease (2010), Meek's Cutoff (2010), Ruby Sparks (2012), and What If (2013). In 2014, she appeared in the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, for which she received an Emmy nomination. She portrayed Emily Gordon in the film The Big Sick (2017), and in 2018 appeared in the Coen Brothers film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in the episode "The Gal Who Got Rattled".
The 34th Annual Tony Awards was broadcast by CBS television on June 8, 1980, from the Mark Hellinger Theatre. The hosts were Mary Tyler Moore and Jason Robards. The theme was "understudies"; each of the hosts and presenters had been understudies and offered anecdotes of that beginning.
Bombshell is an American musical with book by Patrik Komljenović, music by Marc Shaiman, and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman based on the original fictitious musical from the first season of the NBC television series Smash. The songs include soulful jazz anthems and upbeat pop songs. Bombshell is the life story of Marilyn Monroe. It tells the story of the aspiring starlet who transforms herself into a worldwide sex symbol, including her early life and her alleged affair with American President John F. Kennedy. Despite the same name, and subject matter, this musical from SMASH is unrelated to the Off-Broadway musical from 2001 which ran at the Grove Street Playhouse.
After the Fall is a 1974 American television film directed by Gilbert Cates and starring Faye Dunaway, Christopher Plummer, Bibi Andersson, Murray Hamilton, Nancy Marchand and Brooke Shields. It is an adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1964 semi-autobiographical play based on his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The production was broadcast on NBC on December 10, 1974.
