Garfield, Wittrock, Hoffman and Edmond in Death of a Salesman.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is too young to play Willy Loman, the worn-out failure in Mike Nichols’s new revival of Arthur Miller’s masterful tragedy Death of a Salesman. Despite his drooped posture, crippling exhaustion and inability to stand proud—not to mention his preppie haircut, white as snow—he often looks no older than the two actors playing his sons. Still, he’s such an inventive and resourceful young character actor that he is never less than fascinating. To paraphrase the most famous line in the play, attention must still be paid.

Thank goodness Mr. Nichols is so obviously respectful of this high-water mark in American theater that he is reluctant to change, modify or jazz it up in any way to suit contemporary audiences. He has even restored much of Jo Mielziner’s moody set design, Alex North’s somber music and Elia Kazan’s electrifying direction from the original 1949 Broadway production starring the incomparably powerful Lee J. Cobb—all to brilliant effect, illuminating a sad, deeply analytical portrait of the death of the American Dream. And if Mr. Hoffman is not Lee J. Cobb or even Brian Dennehy in the latest Broadway revival, he serves the play in an oddly benevolent way. There’s something doubly touching about a bulky, overweight, bone-weary Willy at the end of his rope, fortified by aspirin and arch supports. The wrenching picture of failure resonates deeper. Mr. Hoffman is acting on pure instinct, not living the part the way Cobb did. But he still made me believe he was too old to drag himself through life selling clothes off the line on the road, winter and summer. He is equally matched by his two sons, the 34-year-old Biff (Andrew Garfield from the great, underrated film Never Let Me Go), once so full of confidence and personality but now—his promise as a football hero dissipated—unfocused and without ambition, with a string of failed jobs and some jail time behind him, and his younger brother, Happy (a terrific Finn Wittrock), a ladies’ man who attends the weddings of girls he’s discarded. And then there is Willy’s brave, struggling wife, Linda (played by Linda Emond with more toughness and resolve than the fragile but magnificent Mildred Dunnock showed in the original production and the 1950 film with Fredric March). My heart always throbs with compassion when Willy first appears in shadow, returning to the empty house and a sleeping Linda who loves him unconditionally in spite of what he’s put her through. She’s the eyes and ears of the play. When Willy daydreams about easier days and friendlier times when he was loved by buyers and storeowners all over New England, it is Linda who listens reverently. But she knows the truth, and it comes out in the flashbacks. Willy brags and lies, but it was always Linda who overlooked her husband’s faults while scrimping and saving to pay the bills. Willy was never popular on the road. The buyers laughed at him. Now, argumentative and short-tempered, he still embellishes his stories of past success. It is Linda who knows the man she chose was neither a great nor an important person. Now he drives 700 miles and nobody knows him anymore. There’s still not enough money to fix the water heater. He’s reached the age of 63 and the two sons he adored have turned into aimless losers, too. The future is an exhaust pipe in the garage.

It’s a grim, reflective story with an episodic structure and a time-roaming nature (Miller didn’t title his autobiography Timebends for nothing) about the terrible self-delusions of a weak man whose faked, empty life has taken a devastating toll on his family. The postwar bleakness has, under Mr. Nichols’s guidance, found a modern relevance. In the sinking economy of today, we have the same working-class traps faced by blue-collar families in financial despair. The plumbing still leaks, they’re behind on their insurance premiums, even if their kids go to college they can’t find employment when they graduate, and the 25-year mortgage is still due. A lot of men are in the same boat as Willy Loman—34 years with the same company and there’s no place to go. No more perfect picture of a human being with his best years behind him and no future to look forward to has ever been written.

Mr. Nichols illuminates every shadow of this dark, trembling and resonant play. He gets the marrow from Willy’s bones until it hurts. Shabby, cheap, dishonest, insufferable and yet heartbreaking, Mr. Hoffman plays underappreciated and disadvantaged like few others can. Strangling on his aborted dreams, he doubles over in pain when he remembers the day Biff discovered him in a Boston hotel room with a cheap floozy—a shock that psychologically unhinged the boy, who never recovered his equilibrium. One of the best scenes is when Willy goes to his boss with his hat in his hands, begging for a desk job that will prolong his life, and gets not only turned down but fired in the bargain. Mr. Hoffman is uneven, but when he is red-faced with shame, sunken with exhaustion and then crumpled with resignation, he is nothing short of great. The rage when Biff yells, “I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!” and the final scene in the cemetery, when the tortured Linda realizes she has nothing to show for her wasted life but a family in shreds—the candor of these scenes still reduces me to a state of awe. This is great writing, burnished with the glow of perceptive direction that brings out a broader implication of the drama, filling out considerably the lack of humanity in Willy that makes him so symbolic of the frustrated “little man” so many productions overlook.

Theater this tender and important doesn’t come along often. I’ve seen many productions of Death of a Salesman, both weak and strong, but I have never seen one with more passion. Don’t even think about missing it.

rreed@observer.com

The niece, Katie, lives with Eddie and his wife, Beatrice, in their tenement apartment in Red Hook. And, of course, the big draw in this current production of A View From a Bridge, which opened Sunday night at the Cort Theatre, is that movie star Scarlett Johansson is making her Broadway debut as Katie, opposite Liev Schreiber as Eddie. Their characters live in a constricted world, filled with other Italian longshoremen and their families, and a strong sense of how things should be. As the play starts, the Carbone home is a seemingly contented one—mother, father and niece-as-daughter living happily and lovingly. But it’s quickly clear there’s tension, too: Katie, in a post–high-school stenography school, has been given a job offer, and Eddie doesn’t want her to take it. It’s clear he can’t allow himself to let her grow up.

That night, two “submarines” arrive, illegal immigrants. They’re Beatrice’s cousins, smuggled in from Italy. They’ll live with the Carbones, and work with Eddie on the docks, and the omerta code of the neighborhood ensures that no one will report them to the Immigration Bureau. One is Marco, dark and solid, a central-casting longshoreman. His brother is Rodolpho, slighter and blond; he also sings and cooks. Katie falls for Rodolpho, and thus begins the tragedy. Eddie won’t tolerate the match, her departure. He first tries to convince Katie that Rodolpho is only interested in her for citizenship; then he tries to convince her “the guy ain’t right,” by which Eddie means that Rodolpho is gay; finally, without any other options, he reports the submarines to Immigration.

Mr. Schreiber, perhaps the most powerful and intense stage actor working today, is, as always, excellent; here, he gives Eddie a restrained physicality that hints throughout at the horrible ending to come. Ms. Johansson, in her first stage role, acquits herself well. She’s too old for the part—she often seems more Beatrice’s younger sister than her school-age niece—but in 1940s costume and with a Brooklyn accent, she effectively tones down her movie-star-ness to give a convincing performance as Katie, rather than a performance of Scarlett Johansson playing Katie. When she has her big final confrontation with Eddie, she can’t quite hold her own against Mr. Schreiber—but then, not many can.

One who does is Corey Stoll, who plays Marco and effectively stands up to Eddie—and to Mr. Schreiber—in their final showdown. Jessica Hecht, as Beatrice, essentially reprises her performance as Blanche in the recent, ill-fated Brighton Beach Memoirs. Morgan Spector, as Rodolpho, is the weak link in the cast: Eddie’s insistence on Rodolpho’s homosexuality should be his own delusion, but Mr. Spector is a touch too fey, with a heart-shaped face that looks a little too much like Alan Cumming’s, to make that clear.

As directed by Gregory Mosher, this View From the Bridge is intense, emotional, physical and moving. It’s impressively economical—every line, movement, reaction exists only to build the tension to what Miller, in a foreword to the script, calls Eddie’s inevitable “catastrophe.” The only times it slackens—and this is Miller’s fault, not Mr. Mosher’s—is when Mr. Alfieri, Eddie’s lawyer, shows up to once more explain what’s going on. It’s unnecessary, and it takes you out of the story. It also prompts the question: When an attorney follows you around all day to explicate the implicit, does he charge an hourly fee or a retainer?

Across the East River, there’s another bridge in town: the second season of the Bridge Project, the collaboration of BAM, London’s Old Vic and Neal Street—the director Sam Mendes’ production company—to produce classical theater with a transatlantic flavor. Last year delivered excellent productions of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, along with some big names: The Chekhov was newly adapted by Tom Stoppard; the company included Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton and Simon Russell Beale and Richard Easton.

This year’s edition pairs two Shakespeare plays: As You Like It, which opened at the BAM Harvey Theater last week, and The Tempest, which will commence next month. The actors are less well known—Thomas Sadoski, as Touchstone in As You Like It, might be the most recognizable name to American theatergoers—but their performances, and the production, are no less good. As You Like It is a charming and romantic play—if also, like many of Shakespeare’s comedies, somewhat ridiculously plotted—and it’s a joy to watch the hijinks unfold, especially on Tom Piper’s gorgeous, painterly Arden Forest set.

It’s been a tough few years for revivals of old three-act farces set in the spacious living rooms of self-absorbed theater people. First, last spring, came the dreadful Accent on Youth, from 1934, in which David Hyde Pierce played an aging playwright in love with his secretary. Then the fall brought The Royal Family, George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s 1927 sendup of the Barrymores, which required audiences to sit through three often-dull hours for the pleasures of its lovely second act.

But now, finally, there’s Noël Coward’s 1939 Present Laughter, which opened in a funny, fresh and entirely entertaining revival at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre last week. It, too, has the requisite living-room set: a decadent Deco duplex with leather couches and a flowing stairway. But, much more important, it’s got a script of witty Coward epigrams and a veteran and very funny cast—under the fleet direction of Nicholas Martin—to deliver them.

Victor Garber plays Garry Essendine, a role Coward wrote for himself, an over-the-top star of the London stage. He’s delightfully entitled, hammy and petulant. Even better is Harriet Harris, who steals each scene she’s in as his arch, droll secretary. Brooks Ashmanskas eventually grows a bit tiresome as an eccentric young playwright attempting to ingratiate himself with Essendine, a high-energy collection of nervous tics and prissy mannerisms. But his initial meeting with Harris’ secretary—a handshake face-off—is some of the best comedic acting I’ve seen.

Horton Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle grew on me. It’s the playwright’s final work—a series of nine one-acts performed over three evenings, tracing the hard life of Horace Robedaux in the early part of the 20th century. I found the first part—in which young Horace loses his father and is abandoned by his mother and then goes to work for a drunken plantation owner—slow-paced and a touch tedious.

But, as my mother—a Foote fan whom I brought along to all three parts—kept telling me, it’s like a good novel, and the pleasure is in getting to know the characters and becoming embedded in their world. Sure enough, in  the second part, the accretion of detail—all those intertwined relatives and reminiscences in Foote’s fictional Harrison, Texas—was drawing me in. By the third part, which opened last night at the Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space, I was wrapped up in the story, suffering along with Horace through the 1918 flu pandemic, feeling his pain when his young daughter dies.

And yet. Orphan’s has done well enough at the Signature—which devotes each season to one playwright, and where all tickets cost only $20, thanks to a grant from Time Warner—that there’s serious talk of moving it to Broadway. I’m no Broadway producer, but nine hours of sad stories, spread over three nights, at Broadway ticket prices, without any big names in the (admittedly excellent) cast, does not seem like a recipe for a hit.

joxfeld@observer.com

Christopher Bigsby is a premier Arthur Miller scholar, with 20 years of direct access to his subject, to Miller’s family, and to the Miller archive to his credit. But comprehensive this biography surely is not. Who besides the Miller clan did Mr. Bigsby interview? No one, judging by a one-page Acknowledgments section and source notes. Interviews with contemporary figures would have offered an immediacy and variety that this univocal narrative lacks.

Mr. Bigsby, director of the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller and other books on the playwright, begins with Miller’s family, a group of Jews who settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where they became prosperous in the garment industry before moving to a spacious home in Harlem, where Miller was born in 1915. In youth, he was torn between parents who were the products of an arranged marriage: Isidore, Miller’s father, was apparently slow-witted and ill-educated (he never learned to read properly); Augusta, Miller’s mother, was both afraid to rebel against her family and resentful because she could not share her intellectual or cultural interests with her husband. Miller’s father was all business, one of those ’20s entrepreneurs who lost a fortune in the stock market crash and could not sustain his garment business. Bankrupt, he moved his family to a modest home in Brooklyn and became part of what Miller saw as a systemic failure on the part of his family and in the capitalist economy.

After working in an auto parts warehouse to earn $500 (enough for college tuition), Miller (a subway reader of Dostoyevsky) decided to enroll at the University of Michigan, where he competed for the prestigious Hopwood writing awards—cash prizes that helped him stay in school during the Depression. In college, he turned to Marxism; like others of his generation, Miller found common cause with unionism, socialism and other varieties of far-left politics. But Miller was slow to realize that self-sacrifice in the cause of communism means in practice suppressing free speech, and that other forms of collective action result in tyrannies and corruption worse than capitalism.

Writing his mother from the University of Michigan, Miller declared himself a communist, and yet he never joined the Communist Party, even though he admired its early anti-fascist position and its support of Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and had an older brother, Kermit, who became a Party member. But Miller devoted most of his energies to writing as a way to better himself and the world. Winning first prize for his first play ratified his bold decision to opt for a writing career.

ARMED WITH HIS college degree, in 1938 Miller returned to Brooklyn, where he lived unhappily with his parents while looking for a job. He worked briefly for the writer’s wing of the WPA before it shut down. He also tried to enlist in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, but he was denied owing to a sports injury to his knee. Instead, he worked as a ship fitter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, doing his bit for the war effort. He also wrote radio plays, which became his principal source of income while he tried his hand at verse dramas for the stage and experimental short stories and aborted novels.

Even though his first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All The Luck (1944), failed after four performances, Miller’s efforts captured the attention of important theater people such as directors Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman. At the same time, Miller’s startling and still apposite novel about anti-Semitism, Focus (1945), earned him a new audience and sales of more than 90,000 copies.

Not until All My Sons (1947) did Miller achieve the Broadway success he had been aiming at for nearly a decade. All My Sons, recently revived on Broadway in a successful production starring John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest, is a Marxist-inspired drama about a parts manufacturer who commits suicide after his son, a war veteran, exposes the fraud that the family firm has perpetrated in passing off defective planes as ready for combat. In this play Miller was finally able to show how personal lives intersect with the fate of society. F.B.I. and anti-Communist groups alike targeted him as a writer hostile to American capitalism, thus setting in motion events that resulted in his famous encounter with HUAC in 1956.

But Miller resisted the tendency to interpret his plays in strictly political terms, insisting his work had poetic and tragic dimensions. Many of his drafts began in verse, with experiments in point of view and time-shifting that challenge the rigors of realism. As Mr. Bigsby observes, “Writing in verse frequently gave him precisely that control over rhythm that he was reaching for, as is evident from the Death of a Salesman and The Crucible notebooks in particular. There are speeches with the stresses marked in, as if this were a poet determined to adhere to strict form.” The creation of Death of a Salesman (1949), for example, is shaped, so to speak, from what is inside Willy Loman’s head. The struggling protagonist’s grandiose dreams of success drive him but also deplete his psyche, which is so dependent on being “well-liked” that he is devoid of inner resources and resorts to suicide. Critics have split on whether Willy is a tragic character, and Mr. Bigsby shies away from a definitive judgment. Willy’s lack of self-knowledge troubles doubters, but Mr. Bigsby endorses Miller’s belief that the play’s worldwide success reflected “man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself.”

Salesman won every prize and brought Miller fame. But his success also intensified the estrangement from his wife, who found herself married to a public man who remained as remote as ever in private. What a pity that her voice is never heard in Mr. Bigsby’s book, which buries her in numerous quotations from Miller, a technique that sometimes make this biography seem like it comes from inside the playwright’s own head. Thus Mr. Bigsby quotes from Miller’s orotund autobiography, Timebends, to describe his subject’s adultery: “Cautiously at first, or so I fatuously thought, I let the mystery and blessing of womankind break like waves over my head once or twice, enough to shatter for me the last belief that social arrangements, including marriage, had something to do with inevitability.”

NOT SO LONG after Salesman’s success, Miller accompanied Elia Kazan on a trip to Hollywood, there encountering Marilyn Monroe. Although Miller returned to his wife, Monroe’s personality profoundly influenced Miller’s drafting of The Crucible (1953), The Misfits (1961), After the Fall (1964) and other stories and plays. These works all feature an older man disturbed but also invigorated by his passion for a younger woman, who represents an innocent freshness that promises to redeem his stale and morally compromised life. From the start, Miller idealized Monroe. Certainly, she had the naïve streak Miller observed, but the hooded, devious nature of her ambition eluded him.

Mr. Bigsby draws some compelling distinctions between Miller and Kazan, particularly when the former broke with the latter, after Kazan named names in his HUAC testimony. Although Kazan came to regret his role as informer, which took a devastating toll on his friends, Mr. Bigsby shows that more was at stake than just the director’s desire to save his Hollywood career. Kazan left the Communist Party 17 years before his HUAC testimony. At his Congressional hearing, he noted that he could not be loyal to an organization he considered undemocratic and subversive, a bullying group that demanded slavish adherence to the party line and took its cues from Moscow. Miller, by contrast, could not overcome a misplaced loyalty to his own radical past. The playwright told his biographer that he did not want to assist reactionaries or to contribute to the hysteria over communism. Similarly, in a statement accompanying a 1956 passport application, Miller “insisted,” in his biographer’s words, that “he would continue making known his opposition to a right wing that seemed intent on destroying liberal values and hence the overseas reputation of the United States.” So was it better, then, for Miller to pretend there was no problem with his stance?

Mr. Bigsby notes that when HUAC called on Miller to name names in 1956, the playwright adopted a position similar to Lillian Hellman’s famous defense of her conscience. Like John Proctor in The Crucible, Miller declared: “I am trying to, and I will, protect my sense of myself. I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.” But Mr. Bigsby also quotes John Steinbeck’s nuanced view comparing Hellman and Kazan: “Each one is right in different ways. … It is very easy to be brave and very hard to be right. Lillian can settle snugly back in a kind of martyrdom but Kazan has to live alone with his decision. I hope I could have had the courage to do what he did.” The figure of the informer haunts Miller’s A View From the Bridge. Eddie Carbone, the play’s protagonist, turns in two illegal immigrants he has harbored in his home, seeking to preserve, in Mr. Bigby’s words, his own innocence when in fact he is expressing his sense of guilt.

Mr. Bigsby’s biography trails off with the well-worn story of Miller’s courageous HUAC appearance, his euphoric then agonizing marriage to Monroe and the demolition of their relationship during the making of The Misfits, a fiasco of a film that features a character, Roslyn Taber, Miller designed to showcase his wife’s talent, but which Monroe came to regard as merely another exploitation of her persona.

A final chapter introduces Miller’s third wife, Inge Morath, a photographer he first met on the set of The Misfits. An accomplished professional devoid of Monroe’s demons, Morath proved to be the perfect complement to Miller’s retiring personality. Her own death in 2002 is briefly described, as is Miller’s in 2005.

Except for access to Miller, his family and his archive, this book is a potted collection of secondary sources. The mind of Miller, alas, triumphs over what should have been a full-fledged biography.

Carl Rollyson, professor of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY, is the author of Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress and other biographies. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Ritt was Jewish; Kazan was not. He was Greek, the original family name Kazanjioglou. But the identification with a persecuted race is revealing: Kazan always felt one down, never fully accepted by a society whose values he otherwise scorned. His response was defiance. Even at the height of his fame, when he was the hottest director in America, twice winner of Academy Awards, Broadway director of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, the chip was firmly on his shoulder. He had an immigrant’s creed: Get ahead, but also get even. Mostly, the anger was concealed behind what Richard Schickel in his affectionate biography calls Kazan’s “Anatolian smile.” What people saw was energy, talent and charm. The anger rarely surfaced. When it did, it came too often as betrayal.

He arrived in America with his family at the age of 4. His father went into the carpet business and was prosperous enough before the Depression hit to send Elia to Williams College, an elite institution, where he was generally miserable. It was an early experience of being an outsider; as Mr. Schickel puts it, “swarthy, runty, big-nosed … nursing a new set of resentments.” From Williams, he drifted to the Yale Drama School, mainly to be with a college friend, Alan Baxter. He didn’t much like Yale either, finding its classes shallow and dull, but he liked Baxter’s girlfriend. Her name was Molly Day Thatcher, and she came with an impeccable WASP pedigree; her grandfather had even been president of Yale. She was the opposite of Kazan in every way and therefore utterly desirable. They became lovers, “the amiable Baxter more or less graciously backing away.” Mr. Schickel may be giving the driven Kazan a pass on this one: It’s possible to question each one of those quoted words except “Baxter.”

Kazan left Yale wanting to be a movie director, influenced by the great Russian directors of the 20’s and 30’s, but ended up in New York with the fledgling Group Theatre. Mr. Schickel is right in saying that “you cannot understand Kazan’s life without understanding ‘the dream of passion’ that was the Group.” Radical, communal, leftist, wildly if unevenly talented, it was dedicated to revolutionizing the American theater, releasing it from its bondage of commercialism. It never succeeded, but it hatched a new style of acting and at least one considerable playwright, Clifford Odets, whose talent was matched only by his self-destructiveness. At first, Kazan functioned as a kind of handyman, repairing props, a fixer of inanimate objects. It led to a name he disliked, but that stuck with him for the rest of his life: Gadget or Gadge.

But he began acting with the group, and here Mr. Schickel—because he apparently never saw Kazan act except in a few small movie parts—doesn’t give him enough credit. I was lucky to have seen him onstage, first as an enthusiastic barker for a Coney Island game called “Fascination!” in Irwin Shaw’s The Gentle People; then creepy and scary as a gangster in the Odets play Golden Boy; and again for Odets in Night Music, as a baffled young man trying to deliver a monkey to someone forgettable. He had no great range, but he was mesmerizing: You did not take your eyes off him. He told me once, long after he had quit acting (disclosure: I was writing a play for him at the time), that he would have liked to have played Richard III. He knew what he had.

At this point, he did two things that would henceforth shape his life: join the Communist Party and start directing. The first didn’t last too long. He resented the party’s rigid attempt to tell him what to do and was losing faith in the party as a force for good; he quit after a few years. But, according to Mr. Schickel, “he never abandoned his working-class sympathies or his belief in the need for some sort of revolutionary reform in America.”

Kazan always considered himself some sort of socialist. His heart was with the poor and the dispossessed; his head was a mixture of idealism and ambition. He wanted to get ahead, and he did. He formed the Actors Studio together with Martin Ritt in order to tap the pool of young talent coming out of the war. But he dumped Ritt when Cheryl Crawford and Bobby Lewis from the Group Theatre came on board and decided that Ritt wasn’t prestigious enough.

He directed hits on Broadway, starting with Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and moving on to Salesman and Streetcar. He went to Hollywood and directed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), then won his first Academy Award with Gentleman’s Agreement (1947).

His directing was like his acting, full of energy and force. Actors loved him; he brought out the best in them. One way was by seduction. With men, it was in intimate chats; he understood and knew you without judgment. He cared, and the caring was (or anyway seemed) real. With women, the seduction was usually in bed. No one complained. I remember him as the most seductive man I ever met and liked him enormously. He told me once that 98 percent of a performance was in the casting, and he had a special gift for finding an actor of no particular distinction or even ability and placing him in that one role where he could be brilliantly effective. Burl Ives in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was a prime example: All he could play was Big Daddy, and he did it again and again in various films and various costumes.

Mr. Schickel is good on the directing, on Kazan’s rise, his friendship with Arthur Miller, his relationship with Marlon Brando. Brando saw his directors as father figures whom he was committed to destroy. Kazan was the exception. Each did his best work with the other, first in Streetcar and then On the Waterfront (1954). Miller fell out with Kazan after the latter’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities but later asked him to direct his play, After The Fall. But something was missing by then, either in the play or the direction, and it was not a success.

Kazan’s wife Molly died in 1963, and he married again—an actress named Barbara Loden, who played the female lead in the Miller play. But she too died of cancer, after a two-year fight. Much later, he married Frances Rudge, an attractive Englishwoman who entranced him on their first meeting by saying that she’d never heard of him; he was still happily married to her at his death.

When Kazan made movies—Viva Zapata! (1952), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Wild River (1960), America America (1963)—he went after social subjects; it was always the side of the street he wanted to work. The films vary in quality, ranging from the power of On the Waterfront to the dutiful Man on a Tightrope (1953), done after his HUAC testimony to demonstrate the sincerity of his anti-Communism. (There was always an additional price to pay.) Eventually, his energy flagged: The last film was a listless adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1976) with a miscast Robert De Niro.

His first novel, The Arrangement (1967), with strong autobiographical elements, became a best-seller. Two years later, he made it into a poor movie that he later regretted. After that came a few mediocre novels, and then he wrote his autobiography, A Life (1988). It’s unfair to Richard Schickel that he comes after this. It’s a hard act to follow: brilliant, shameless, scathing about himself, fascinating about directing, a fuck-you to the world. Along with the best of his films, it stands as his monument. He died in September of 2003, aged 94.

Mr. Schickel calls his book a “critical biography.” He tells the story well and chattily, never reluctant to give his own opinions, whether artistic or political. His bias is clear: He’s a liberal anti-Communist who cares about his subject, and though he’s aware of Kazan’s flaws, he’s generally willing to give him the benefit of doubt. The betrayal of his first wife is glossed over; the serial philandering seems due mainly to sexual exuberance and a taste for blondes. The sharing of Marilyn Monroe between Kazan and Arthur Miller is seen as pretty much normal activity among men and starlets in those days, not as exploitation. Kazan’s HUAC testimony, when he gave the names of people with whom he’d been in the Communist Party, is judged responsible and blameless.

When it comes to politics, Mr. Schickel’s book is less of a biography and more of a lawyer’s brief. He starts with a 19-page prologue dealing with the 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award given to Kazan by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—as though that distinction defined Kazan’s life. There were protests and pickets around the theater the night the award was presented. Many in the audience refused to stand at the presentation. There was a feeling—which I shared—that part of Kazan’s “lifetime achievement” was his collaboration with HUAC, a committee of bigots, racists and anti-Semites whose function was always the stifling of dissent. Kazan named people he knew were innocent of any crime. And he gave his own name. The committee wasn’t really interested in the other names—they already had them all. They wanted Kazan’s name, wanted to show that this important man was with them, agreed with them, was on their side. He gave them his name, and that’s why there was the protest. He hurt other artists, but he also soiled himself, and the stain remained.

According to Mr. Schickel, the protest was mounted by the “aged remnants of Stalinism, by their younger allies from the New Left and by good-hearted, liberal-minded show folks who had no understanding of the left-sectarian battles that had long ago shaped the politics of their trade.” But naming names was a moral issue more than a political one, and those past left-sectarian battles had nothing to do with what was going on.

Mr. Schickel is obsessed with Communists. For him, the Cold War is still with us. Though he’s normally a tolerant man, the gloves are off when it comes to the Reds. John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood 10 who went to jail, “snivels … grovels before the Party hierarchy … writes dreadful screenplays.” Mr. Schickel suspects without proof that Jules Dassin, the blacklisted director living in Greece, probably sabotaged Kazan’s plans to shoot a movie there. He often sounds as though attacking Kazan is defending Stalin. He loves Kazan—it’s one of the attractive qualities of his book—but his ardor too frequently turns his biography into a rescue operation.

Elia Kazan has no need to be rescued. He was what he was: a complex man with an impressive body of work who once publicly did something he shouldn’t have done. Worse crimes have been committed. He didn’t kill children or torture anyone. All he did was rat out a few people he disliked anyway. Perhaps part of the reason he did what he did was because he wanted so desperately to be an American. In that, he succeeded more than he knew and established himself in a long line of achieving Americans: charming, talented, intelligent, seductive and prone to betrayal.

Walter Bernstein, a screenwriter, is the author of Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (Da Capo).

Still, he inherited Mabel's throne and made Cole Porter, Vernon Duke, Irving Berlin and Cy Coleman more popular than ever. When he died unexpectedly Monday at 80, he drove the final nail in the coffin lid of sophisticated popular music. But I believe the purity of what he contributed to the world of popular music will still mean something. He relentlessly pursued do when everybody said don't, and in a world where music has largely been replaced by jerks and groans and flat falsetto screams programmed by I.B.M. computers that have regrettably gone mad, Bobby Short sang about love-the one thing that will never become camp. Pity the saloon singers who elect to follow in the footsteps of his patent-leather shoes.

For the poor son of a coal miner from Danville, Ill., he learned fast. Robert Nahas, his best friend and the co-executor of his estate, says, "Bobby came out of the womb attached to a grand piano." He could never read a note of music, but he played the piano in Danville saloons at the age of 9, ran away from home at 12 and landed in New York just shy of 13, quickly becoming the darling of café society. It was years before he found a permanent perch at the swank Café Carlyle, but it was home for nearly 40 years. From the beginning, he didn't hang out with the cats. He loved to sing and play black anthems by Lil Green and Fats Waller, but was more at home with the Blue Ribbon 400 than the Harlem jazzbos who frequented the old Cotton Club. His apartment was filled with trophies and awards, a testament to the fact that he was an easy person to honor at charity benefits. His society clientele were the high rollers who could afford to write $10,000 checks. Yet he successfully straddled several worlds and remained a darling of jazz purists from Sugar Hill, matrons from Park Avenue and tourists from Little Rock.

In the past few years, even after rap and rock relegated real music to museum status, a visit to hear Bobby Short sing "From This Moment On" at the Carlyle was as de rigueur on a trip to New York as a tour of Ground Zero. Wherever Bobby Short appeared, he brought back an era for his audience of faded glamour girls in their last 40 pounds of unhocked Bulgaris and aging Esquire covers who never wandered west of Fifth Avenue except to sail for Europe. Full of the old paprika, he gave them what they wanted: nostalgia and romance and take-home tunes they could hum. He was always worth the check. A soigné dresser and an eager consumer of the best life had to offer, Bobby was often accused of being too "swellegant" for words; but although he drank the best champagne and spent half of the year at his villa in the South of France, a stone's throw from the exclusive Moulin de Mougins restaurant, his three favorite words in the culinary legerdemain were "macaroni and cheese."

I never attended a Bobby Short dinner party that didn't serve fried chicken or meat loaf. And while it is impossible to imagine an elevator operator on his guest list, his snobbery had charm. He rubbed elbows with kings and queens, yet he told me one of the greatest events in his life was the night I took Alice Faye to the Café Carlyle. He played for her while she sang "You'll Never Know" seated at the table. He never recovered. Conversely, he was in high dudgeon the night he was invited to sing for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the Nixon White House. When Bobby was told his musicians would be served sandwiches and coffee in the kitchen, he was on his way to the exit door when they suddenly appeared-the royal couple, escorted along the corridor to the state dining room by Richard and Pat Nixon. They spotted Bobby, broke stride, ran to the kitchen door, swept him up in their arms and dragged him into the dinner, leaving a mortified First Family with their mouths wide open. It was one of Bobby's proudest moments.

One more anecdote: One cold winter weekend, when we were both house guests at Claudette Colbert's house in Barbados, Bobby and I were walking on the beach (a sight you don't want to see) when we passed one of those second-rate surfside motels that cater to the worst kind of British tourists. On the wooden deck, a pudgy woman red as a boiled lobster was waving frantically with one of those floppy straw hats you buy in Caribbean airport lounges. "She knows us," I said. "Oh, God, ignore her … too tacky for words," scowled Bobby, whose eyesight was so bad he sometimes mistook C.E.O.'s for head waiters. I moved closer. "My God, Bobby," I yelped. "It's Judi Dench!" His mood did an about-face. We took her home for tea.

He suffered from neuropathy, but although he limped to the piano with a cane, the minute the lights hit him, Bobby Short had sparkle and spruce. He made 32 bars sound like an overture. He made noises about retiring from show business, but he had just signed a new contract at the Carlyle. At Chita Rivera's opening, he was in pain, but we all thought it was the neuropathy. When she introduced him, he got a standing ovation and glowed with Cheshire-cat satisfaction. Last Wednesday, he was diagnosed with an irreversible blood count of white cells and died from leukemia five days later. Hours from death, he was still humming and running lyrics in his head for his next CD of Fred Astaire songs. His treasured legacy of song sheets, big-band records, orchestrations and other historically significant musical memorabilia will go to the Smithsonian, Lincoln Center and a dozen of the charities he generously supported. He left specific instructions that no memorial service was to be held. It's the one part of his last will and testament that seems unlikely to be honored. Above all, Bobby Short could never resist a good party.

Woody Is Back

I once wrote that Woody Allen on a bad day was better than everybody else on Sunday. In recent years, I've had to rescind that appraisal. In one bland, disappointing failure after another, he's proved that he can be just as bad as the next guy. That is why it gives me pleasure to report that with his charming new opus, Melinda and Melinda, Woody's got his groove back.

The renewed interest in portrait photography as art, channeled by the Diane Arbus exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, has caused a revolution. Suddenly, everyone is looking at faces in a different way. Whether it's one of Ms. Arbus' tattooed carnival freaks or the Lewis Carroll photo of Alice Liddell, his model for Alice in Wonderland, the contours of the human countenance are open to diverse interpretations. This is what I was thinking as I sat enjoyably entertained by Melinda and Melinda, a bright, jaunty comedy in a jazz tempo that mirrors two opposing sides of a single personality, dramatized by two different writers with opposite takes on life.

We open in the trendy Pastis bistro in Greenwich Village, where two of the kind of playwrights you always want to eavesdrop on at a cafe table more interesting than your own are debating the relevance of their plays to real life, and debating the plot for a new piece about a disruptive figure named Melinda. The idea begins as an anecdote and ends as a full-scale production with different sets, characters and punch lines, proving the point that no two people ever see things the same way, onstage or in life. The comedy writer (the overworked Wallace Shawn, the only actor in history, to my knowledge, who has parlayed a speech impediment into a career), thinks laughs, while the other (Larry Pine), who specializes in darkness, sees tears. What follows for 90 blissful minutes (no movie should ever last one minute longer) is two stories about the same woman, interweaving wit and sadness like yellow and black yarns in a needlepoint rug.

In Plot 1, Melinda Robichaux (Radha Mitchell) arrives in the middle of a dinner party at the loft of an old friend named Laurel (Chloë Sevigny) and her husband, an alcoholic actor named Lee (Jonny Lee Miller), and proceeds to wreck the evening by guzzling expensive scotch and launching into an exhausting emotional tirade that drains the guests and wrecks the husband's chances at an acting job he covets. Ah, but the humorist sees a comedy here with Neil Simon overtones. In his spin, which we will call Plot 2, Melinda is the neurotic downstairs neighbor of a different couple-a bumbling actor and amateur chef named Hobie (Will Ferrell) and his wife Susan (Amanda Peet), who has written an independent film she is also going to direct; the film is about a shrink, and her husband has his heart set on the role. This Melinda, who has taken 28 sleeping pills in the downstairs sublet, crashes in just as the coquilles St. Jacques are being served, ruins the sea bass and wreaks havoc on the lives of everyone present. In both of the parallel plots, Melinda hacks her way through New York with an emotional machete, leaving a trail of misery and woe while you find yourself laughing aloud at her inexhaustible supply of oblivious self-absorption. Sometimes the stories are funny when they ought to be sad, and sometimes your mouth falls open during the sight gags at how horrible life can be when Melinda is around, spreading mischievous chaos.

The two plots play leap frog. Sometimes the transitions are smooth and you don't see the seams. Other times, they butt heads. But from start to finish, Woody's dialogue is both formally structural and wryly conversational. In Plot 1, Melinda is like the title character in All About Eve-"Everything," said Thelma Ritter, "but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end." She succumbed to drugs and alcohol, left her husband and lost two children in a custody battle, killed a two-timing lover with a gun, served a prison sentence for murder and attempted suicide. In Plot 2, she is an accomplished but childless art historian whose husband left her for a beauty-contest winner. In both plots, her friends and neighbors set her up with every available single hunk they know while their own lives collapse, but both Melindas turn down upwardly mobile chances to rise in the Manhattan social dynamic, one Melinda falling for Hobie, of all people, and the other for a black musician named Ellis Moonsong (played by the unpronounceable Chiwetel Ejiofor, from Dirty Pretty Things). The Hobie role is the Woody surrogate, but Mr. Ferrell doesn't do much with it. After losing the leading role in his wife's movie and being demoted to the role of "the retarded elevator operator with the cleft palate," he goes to a shrink himself. The marriage has been in trouble for years ("The last time we made love she just lay there, staring into the darkness, like her parents had been killed in a fire.") So he tries something new and kinky-sex with a right-wing radical who posed nude for a Playboy spread on naked Republicans. This is Woody writing for himself, and Mr. Ferrell plays it with Woody's tics, vocal inflections and whining mannerisms, stuttering and talking to himself in funny asides nobody else hears, just like Woody. Too bad he has none of the charm or technique required to sustain the gimmick for 90 minutes. One sight gag, in which he gets his bathrobe caught in Melinda's front door while peeking through her keyhole, wouldn't even make it as far as a Saturday Night Live sketch. This is not a Woody Allen film full of all-star turns down to the smallest cameo. Most of the actors do their best without Woody to play off in the same shared camera space. For an actress required to be in almost every scene, Radha Mitchell is a Naomi Watts clone with range and appeal, but she may be the first movie star I've ever seen with a wart between her eyes.

But if Woody the actor is sadly missed here, Woody the director spreads his trademark flourishes everywhere. The music is rangy and wonderful, from Bach to "Take the A Train." No matter how depressed everyone gets, they all live in fabulous apartments with space and atmosphere and antiques and designer sheets. They hang out in all the places nobody in New York can afford except the tourists-and they can smoke anywhere! From Belmont Park to Bowling Green, it's a fairy tale New York, photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond like a lunar surface in a home show on Venus. Even the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital would be the envy of Elsie de Wolfe. But Woody transforms his settings into a part of the Manhattan dream you used to hear about in lyrics by Lorenz Hart. And best of all, Woody knows precisely when and how to end it all (as the final moment attests), with a snap of the fingers. No waiting around to feel your way into and out of things. The ignition starts in the beginning, the action cuts to split-timing black in the end. No bows, baby, just eight bars and out. Woody Allen films are like the short stories in The New Yorker back in the good old days of William Maxwell, Sally Benson and Hortense Calisher. It's a place I've never been, but I know I'm going to like it when I get there.

Very Sad Ballad

Small films about small lives trying vainly to intersect but falling miles apart can sometimes be rewarding. But The Ballad of Jack and Rose, an offbeat tone poem with an atonal dissonance written and directed by Rebecca Miller and starring her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, is a curio that is just too self-consciously offbeat for its own good. In 1986, on an island off the East Coast, an aging hippie named Jack lives in the ruins of an abandoned commune from the 60's with his 16-year-old daughter Rose. Like the eccentrics from another recent rumination, Campbell Scott's Off the Map, Jack has sheltered Rose from the outside world and its evil influences, like newspapers, junk-food franchises, TV and sex. Most of their time is spent saving the wetlands and fighting off the developer (Beau Bridges) who is trashing the environment by erecting plastic pre-fab housing projects. But now Jack is dying of a mysterious cinematic heart ailment and realizes that Rose needs the influence of a woman around the house.

When he invites his trashy girlfriend Kathleen (Catherine Keener) and her two weird sons to join their privileged world of primitive seclusion, Rose feels betrayed and violated. One boy shapes and perms her hair, the other eradicates her virginity. To hurt her father, she hangs up the bloody sheet on the clothesline with a note that drives him to violence. To hurt his lady friend, she conceals a poisonous snake under the bed while you wait for something gruesome to happen. It does, and not a moment too soon. Jack, once a peace-loving man, bulldozes the model house for the new housing project and breaks the arms and legs of the boy who defiled Rose. Rose burns down the house. By the time all of this happens, I had pressed the snooze button, and so had the movie. I mean, Ms. Miller knocks herself out creating a miscellany of eccentrics, all right. But they are also something of a bore.

The actors struggle valiantly to work some three-dimensional energy into one-dimensional roles, but Ms. Miller's writing is as dusty as her direction is meager. It can't be easy to be a child of the late, great playwright Arthur Miller who wants to write. I admire the daughter for not emulating the father, but a few basic lessons in character development, cliche-avoidance dialogue and the architecture of trajectory are recommended. As Rose, teenager Camilla Belle looks older and wiser than the grownups. As the trashy, encroaching misfit, Catherine Keener is wasted. As Jack, Daniel Day-Lewis is creepier than his role. Sinewy and emaciated, with bones sticking through his skin like croquet mallets, he looks like he's auditioning for the insomniac zombie Christian Bale played in The Machinist. He's accomplished, goodness knows, but his choices here are bizarre. His heavy Scottish brogue, feral tattoos and dangling gypsy earring are dolorous enough, but would a leftover flower child from the grains-and-berries era go around wearing the kind of hat favored by the Marx Brothers? Actors directed by their own wives is a rare category in which I never expected to find the Oscar-winning star of My Left Foot, and I hope he doesn't make a habit of it. It's too late in the career of a respected artist like Daniel Day-Lewis to go around singing "What I Did For Love."

Huh?

For sewage in a cocktail shaker, there is Oldboy, a noxious helping of Korean Grand Guignol as pointless as it is shocking. What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs? Directed by Chan-wook Park, a film-festival "comer" in this nation of emerging cinematic schlock, a cheerful drunk named Dae-su Oh disappears from the phone book and is sealed in a room for 15 years. Injected with drugs and forced to sleep every night with Valium gas that hisses through vents in the walls, he has no idea where he is, who put him there, or what he did to deserve such a fate in the first place. He keeps track of the time he's imprisoned in this hole by etching a tattoo on his body for every year. Suddenly, he's released in a field from the inside of a steamer trunk, more confused than ever. What follows is an extended two-hour nightmare in which he tries to track down his captors by tracing the takeout food they fed him in his cell, while the voices of his torturers contact him on cell phones and computer chat-room Web sites. What is going on here? Nobody knows. Meanwhile, he defeats an entire gang of killers with a knife sticking out of his back. He eats a live eel. A severed hand rips out a man's teeth, one by one, with a hammer. Blood flows, there is much vomiting and incest, and more screams than Japanese kabuki. Part kung fu, part revenge-theme Charlie Chan murder mystery, part metaphysical Oriental mumbo-jumbo, all of it incomprehensible. Dae-su Oh is played by Min-sik Choi. I walked out at the point where he grabbed a pair of sharp scissors and cut his tongue off in blood-splattering close-ups. Obviously the actor is still in one piece, but I'd be willing to bet there's some poor cow somewhere in Pusan who can no longer moo. Oldboy makes strange music, but it's like a three-hour concerto played on a theremin.

Both Andrew Cuomo and Mark Green want to be New York's next State Attorney General. Why? Well, because it's there-the job, that is. With incumbent Attorney General Eliot Spitzer running for Governor, a job Mr. Cuomo so disastrously sought in 2002, there will be a vacancy as the state's top law-enforcement official in 2006. Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Green hope to fill that vacancy.

There's nothing wrong with ambition, and both Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Green have every right to run for whatever office suits their fancy. But haven't we heard enough from these two men? The public certainly thinks so. That's why both are out of office at the moment.

Actually, Mr. Cuomo has never held elective office, although he's been around state politics for more than two decades. When he finally figured the time was right-in 2002-he was wrong. Mr. Cuomo dropped out of a Democratic primary for Governor that year rather than face electoral humiliation at the hands of the eventual nominee, H. Carl McCall.

Mr. Green served as the city's Public Advocate in the 1990's, but lost bids for the House of Representatives, U.S. Senate and, most recently, Mayor. And yet, Mr. Green is ready to offer himself for another office.

Apparently, some folks just don't know when they're not wanted.

The media no doubt will focus much of their attention on these two reminders of yesterday's politics. That's too bad, because there is a possible candidate for Attorney General who ought to be getting more attention. Republican State Senator Michael Balboni of Nassau County has an outstanding record on an issue that may well define the office of Attorney General in the 21st century: homeland security. And he appears to be a more authentic candidate.

Mr. Green and Mr. Cuomo lack the expertise to see the challenges that confront law enforcement in an age of global terror. They see the office as a glorified ombudsman for consumer complaints.

Should Mr. Balboni decide to run, the office surely will be transformed to account for the threats that New York faces every day. They come not from fly-by-night electronics stores, but from murderous terrorists. Mr. Balboni, who chairs the State Senate's Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs, has been in the forefront of anti-terror legislation. He knows the world has indeed changed since 9/11 and would bring that needed perspective to an office that should be more than a stepping stone or a personal bully pulpit.

Arthur Miller

When Arthur Miller died last week at the age of 89 at his home in Roxbury, Conn., the world lost a man whose plays struggled to compete for attention with the grand themes of the life he lived. Just as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible lit up the country's charged emotional landscape, Miller's staunch stand against the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his storied marriage to Marilyn Monroe made him more than just an acute observer of American life in the 1950's and 1960's, but a powerful, iconic presence who participated, as much off the stage as on it, in the shaping of how the country thought about itself during a time of profound introspection and agitation.

Despite the raves and hyperbole about Miller's plays, his work might not really achieve literary greatness; but at the same time, it's impossible and disturbing to imagine what America would have been like without him. He was born into a prosperous Manhattan family whose apartment overlooked Central Park. His father lost his money in the Depression, and they relocated to Flatbush. Miller scraped together money from odd jobs to attend the University of Michigan, married his college sweetheart, and went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to pay the bills. In 1947, his play All My Sons won two Tony Awards and beat Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh for the New York Drama Critics' Circle award. Two years later, when he was 33, Death of a Salesman became the first play in Broadway history to win the Tony, Pulitzer and Drama Critics' Circle awards. And it still packs a punch: The 1999 Broadway revival starring Brian Dennehy, which won five Tony Awards, will be opening in London this spring.

Miller's art was always entwined with his politics, and his example is bracing in an age when social conscience has become an antique. He famously refused to name names during the Communist-bating McCarthy era-an experience which he would mine for his art in The Crucible-and took strong public stands in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Up until his death, Miller was working on revivals of his plays and writing new plays, striving to make theater which would "raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities." He found it impossible to seal himself off from America's fate. "The country is now being ruled by actors," he said last year. "Behind the play is a kind of death dance taking place. Politicians have always pretended to be what they aren't. I keep thinking of the Romans because they were conscious of the power of ritualized performance. Every culture has it, but it struck me that we're doing it now on such a crude, open, ridiculous level."

Politics were just one leg he stood on. Miller took a lead role in the country's enduring romantic myths when he wed Marilyn Monroe in the 1950's. The most famously sexy woman in Hollywood fell in love with the lanky playwright who, for a few years, seemed to give her what the rest of the world could not. They seemed truly enchanted with each other; Monroe even converted to Judaism. But the marriage crumbled after four years, and six months later Monroe was dead. America has never quite gotten over their marriage and the idea of true love between the chilly, cerebral playwright and the sultry screen siren.

Privately fascinating and publicly decent, Arthur Miller espoused a dark view of human nature, but one which was always tempered by the faith that an artist can do much to dispel that darkness.

The Gates

The praise has been a tad giddy, the prose perhaps a bit purple, but there's no denying that The Gates are a hit. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's self-financed $20 million saffron-hued adornment of Central Park has awoken the city from its traditional February hibernation and brought tens of thousands of tourists into town. Twenty-three miles of footpaths have been transformed by 7,500 gates bearing over 100,000 miles of fabric; the gates not only bring a splash of bright color to winter's grays, they also illuminate Central Park's sublime natural beauty.

The project has been in the works since 1979, but it was never inevitable: Michael Bloomberg was the first Mayor to see the potential and the profit, and had the political courage to reverse 20 years of rejection of this project. Indeed, in 1981 the city's Parks Department submitted a 107-page report arguing against Christo's proposal, mostly because the park had fallen into disrepair and wasn't the sort of place the city wished to showcase. But since then, the park has been rescued from neglect by the privately funded Central Park Conservancy, and Mayor Bloomberg recognized that Christo's worldwide fame and proven track record- wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris in gold, the Reichstag in Berlin in silver-would reflect well on the city as an international cultural center. And he pulled it off without any municipal costs or damage to the park. The Economic Development Corporation estimates that The Gates will result in $80 million of business for hotels, restaurants and retailers, and will generate $2.5 million in city taxes. Not bad for a two-week show.

It's also worth noting that the Bulgarian-born Christo and his French-born wife have lived in New York since the 1960's. A reminder that the city has always been home to many of the world's boldest visionaries, and that all New Yorkers benefit.

For an American icon, he was particularly unpretentious and human. A while ago, I was asked along to a dinner given by an old friend of his who lived in two chaotic rooms of the Chelsea Hotel. "Beautiful take-out," he said, teasing the host, who couldn't cook to save his life. The take-out wasn't so hot either. Miller was easy to talk to, like an elderly uncle. He looked pleased when I mentioned I'd just seen a fine revival of All My Sons.

"Yeah, I enjoyed it, too," he said unself-consciously.

Then I told him what happened during the intermission. A middle-aged man sitting next to me told me how much he liked the show and began to study his Playbill intently. At length, he looked up and said, "I didn't know Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman."

I thought Miller would bust a gut, he was laughing so much. At the same time, he was thrilled. Here was a man-an ordinary man-who was going to the theater to see a play, and he was just giving his honest response. The man was glad to be there, too.

There was nothing elitist about Arthur Miller or his plays. He was influenced by Ibsen and the Greeks, but he wrote from the gut, unafraid of the pull of honest emotion expressed by so-called ordinary folk. It's why we could connect with his great dramas, for all family wars and disappointments and yearnings are universal. Willy Loman is a "low man"-not a god or king, but Everyman.

Miller kept a carpentry shop at his home in Litchfield County where he made simple and workmanlike tables and chairs for the house, craftsmanlike and undecorative like his plays. He was a tall and famously handsome man, and his huge hands looked as if they could smash a typewriter in two. His modest writing studio was isolated in the surrounding grounds of the house. The room was virtually barren, with cheap linoleum on the floors, no pictures on the walls, no telephone. At the time, he worked at a desk he'd made and wrote on a 30-year-old typewriter.

His Roxbury, Conn., home, however, was more of an estate, with at least 350 acres: Miller was almost certainly the wealthiest playwright of our time (next to Neil Simon). Interviewing him a few years ago for a Vanity Fair piece, I assumed that the published play version of Death of a Salesman must have been his biggest seller, but he corrected me: It was The Crucible, his moral parable of the McCarthy witchhunts that became a universal tragedy of fanaticism and intolerance.

There had been different publishers of The Crucible since 1953, however, and he didn't know exactly how many copies of it had been sold. Would I try to find out for him? So the researchers at the magazine got to work on the play's tangled publishing history, and they came up with the staggering number of four and half million. "You live and learn," said Miller, impressed.

I couldn't resist adding that if he earned a dollar a copy, by my reckoning that made it well over two million dollars for just one published version of his plays.

"Well, someone's got to make it," he replied.

His plays remained popular in England, even though he long ago became unfashionable in America. He put it down to the commercial independence of nonprofit theaters in England like the National and bitterly regretted that there's no real equivalent system here. "But who gives a goddamn about fashion?" he protested when I mentioned the subject. "The only test of a play does not belong to fashion. The only test should be, 'Do I listen to this playwright or not? Does his play move me?'"

But he did give a goddamn, of course. In the punishing world of theater, great dramatists often have a cluster of early, successful work that isn't equaled in later years. Yet Miller never stopped writing! Theater was his public forum. Until the end, until well into his 80's, he still had things to say, and would not be silenced.

Laurence Olivier had a lot to thank him for. It was Miller who led the unlikely way to Olivier, the greatest classical actor of the 20th century, playing his most memorable modern stage role, the seedy, failed comedian Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer.

In July 1957, Miller accompanied his wife, Marilyn Monroe, to London, where she was filming the period comedy about a breathy innocent abroad, The Prince and the Showgir l, directed by her co-star, Olivier. Welcoming Miller-nicknamed "Mr. Monroe" and "Marilyn's Boy" by the British press-Olivier asked which plays he was interested in seeing. Miller named Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which had just opened at the Royal Court, because the title intrigued him.

To his surprise, however, Olivier advised him to pick something else-dismissing the breakthrough social drama he'd already seen with "It's just a travesty on England." It made Miller even keener to see it. Tickets were quickly arranged for the following night, and Olivier turned up unexpectedly to see the play a second time with him. He was stunned when Miller found Look Back in Anger a revelation-the first modern English play of the period, he said subsequently, to speak to him.

Anxious to grasp its significance, Olivier asked him twice-during the intermission, and again at the end-why he thought the play was so wonderful. Then they went backstage to meet the snarling 25-year-old Osborne. "Do you suppose you could write something for me?" a smiling Olivier asked him cravenly. According to Miller, Olivier was laying on the charm so much he could have convinced anyone to buy a car without wheels from him for $20,000.

Osborne's next play was The Entertainer, and the rest, thanks to Arthur Miller's role as the go-between, really is history.

Ten years ago, he was back at the Royal Court to see a new play with a friend of his, the London producer Robert Fox. (It's best, I guess, if we don't name the writer of the play.) Within a few minutes, however, Fox could hear Miller groaning to himself and shifting restlessly in his seat.

"Are you all right, Arthur?" he asked him as they were both taking a leak during intermission.

"No, I'm not," Miller replied feistily. "This is crap! Let's go."

Aware that members of the audience had recognized him, Fox suggested that perhaps he ought to stay for the second act

"It's crap and we're going!" Miller insisted, heading for the exit. "If we're not enjoying ourselves, why stay? Life's too short. I'm seventy-nine!"

For the disappointed theatergoer, life is always too short.

Lastly, this story Miller told me when I first met him that summer day in Connecticut all those years ago. There was a lake on his property, and as he took a gentle swim in it, he mentioned a TV soap opera that his sister, the actress Joan Copeland, had once starred in. Therein lies a tale and a Miller moral.

The character his sister played was killed off. Miller told me that his sister played the role of Ethel, who unexpectedly starts to die from an incurable disease. But when it dawned on the viewers what was happening, the TV station received thousands of letters in protest. Ethel must stay! But the die was cast, and they killed off Ethel just the same.

Then they thought up a bright idea. After a decent pause, Miller's sister returned to the soap opera as Ethel's long-lost twin from South Africa. But whereas Ethel had been a lovable character, her twin sister wasn't. So the protest letters poured in again. Ethel would never have a twin sister like this! The twin must go! So they killed her off.

"I hope this teaches us all a lesson," said Arthur Miller. "Never mess around with a good thing."

Then he swam off in the lake, at a determined, even pace.

the Fall is one of those troubled plays that has been rarely staged and

widely discussed. An artistic failure when it launched the unfulfilled dream of

a Lincoln Center Repertory Company in 1964, the play became notorious for Mr.

Miller's characterization of his ex-wife Marilyn Monroe in the central role of

the suicidal Maggie.

Monroe had just died of an overdose when After the Fall premiered-making the surrounding gossip even worse.

The play itself-with Jason Robards in the demanding role of its narrator,

Quentin-was swamped by the Monroe controversy, and the playwright was accused

of abusing her memory.

"Coming so soon after Marilyn's death, After the Fall had to fail," Mr. Miller wrote defensively in Timebends . But when it was revived 20

years later with Frank Langella-by which time the Monroe connection had

cooled-the outcome was still unhappy. The

Times ' Frank Rich wrote that in spite of all the fine staging and acting in

the 1984 revival, we "still go home feeling more exhausted than enlightened."

His parting shot damned the play: "It's hard to imagine a better-or, for that

matter, another-production of After the

Fall for some time to come."

The time has come! Michael

Mayer's current revival for the Roundabout at the American Airlines Theatre on

Broadway, is my first viewing of the famously failed play, and I wish I could

report the discovery of a lost, misunderstood masterpiece. The new production

isn't helped, I regret to say, by the fatal miscasting of TV star Peter Krause

(of Six Feet Under ) in the leading

role. But can anyone figure out why the director and his designer, Richard

Hoover, have chosen to stage the play in an airport lounge?

Mr. Miller's first words in the script are: "The action takes

place in the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin." And here we are instead in

"Idlewild Airport, New York City, 1962" (the Playbill informs us), or a virtual stage replica of Eero Saarinen's

T.W.A. building. Why an airport? As Groucho once put it, "Vy a duck?"

The playwright's stated intention is absolutely central to the

play. He wants to reproduce the interior life of a man in crisis as certain

visions and memories swirl in a near-surreal nightmare. An airport lounge

doesn't do it: It's static, literal and earthbound.

But Mr. Krause is simply unable to convey the torment of his

character (let alone any interior life). He's playing a cipher, a dull empty

vessel. Mr. Krause looks dorkily youthful in his pinstripe suit. (Quentin is

about 40 and on the edge of a nervous breakdown). There's no neurotic vitality

in Mr. Krause, no outrage or pain or necessary self-disgust. Even

Maggie/Marilyn can't bring him to life. Yet Quentin should be a conscience-stricken

killer of sorts. After the Fall is

fundamentally about his wives and women; it's about wracked denial and the

impossibility of innocence. But without stature-presence-there's no fall.

It's harsh, but Peter Krause's name on the marquee is meant to

sell theater tickets, I guess. Yet what does it really confirm? From Kelsey

Grammer's Macbeth to Ashley Judd's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Mr. Krause's After the Fall , the chasm between TV

acting and the stage is as wide as a canyon.

Mr. Miller has dressed up a melodrama as Greek tragedy just the

same. The private (his own autobiography or an adaptation of it) sinks under

the weight of the play's mighty public themes (the Holocaust, the Great Crash,

the McCarthy witchhunt, even the myth and destruction of an American Goddess).

It's astonishing that Mr. Miller has always denied that Maggie is based on

Monroe. He's in denial about a play that's about denial!

You can put Maggie in a red wig. (Carla Gugino, in an appealing

performance channeling Marilyn, is a redhead here.) You can have her played by

a talented black actress (as Michael Blakemore did in his production at the

National Theatre in England). You can do what you want. But Mr. Miller's Maggie

is an unmistakable portrait of Monroe, and it turns us all into voyeurs.

Almost all of Act II is about the disintegration of Quentin's

marriage to Maggie. He's a liberal Jewish lawyer with a guilty conscience;

she's a singer and iconic sex symbol who slides from a true naïveté to

self-hatred and suicide. Mr. Miller was after an archetypal tragedy of

innocence, but Monroe's public myth is too much baggage (and too familiar a

tale). He actually wrote about her more vividly in Timebends , where she brushed her hair back as if with a gun and

death hovered over the woman he loved and wanted to save.

But Quentin is too much the

sanctimonious fallen saint here, with his confessional, hangdog guilt and

overheated monologues. "She had the truth that day, I bought the lie that she

had to be 'saved'! From what? Except my own contempt!"

There's an uncharacteristic,

convoluted fuzziness from the playwright whose best plays have elevated theater

to a clear-eyed moral debate and public forum. Here's the self-searching

Quentin again: "Aren't there mothers who keep dissatisfaction hidden to the

grave, and do not split the faith of sons until they go in guilt for what they

did not do? And I'll go further-here's the final bafflement for me-is it

altogether good to be not guilty for what another does?"

Huh?

But then, the wordy drama is overcrowded and sketchy-as if Mr.

Miller was in search of his touch again after a near 10-year hiatus. (His

previous plays were produced in 1955, A

Memory of Two Mondays and A View from

the Bridge ). Having dealt definitively with McCarthyism in The Crucible , the issue of naming names

in After the Fall has now become

token (a couple of pro forma scenes, a convenient suicide and a brief,

disguised sketch of Elia Kazan, the collaborator). Even Mr. Miller's family

portrait in the play of father and sons-an enduring legacy of his early great

dramas-falters badly here to the point of a near-farcical scene between Quentin

and his hospitalized old dad.

"Mother died," Mr. Krause's lackluster Quentin tells him with all

the distress of someone saying, "Have a nice a day." "She had a heart attack

last night on her way home."

"Oh, no, no, no, no," inconsolable Dad cries.

Mr. Mayer-who directed a fine A

View from the Bridge for the Roundabout a few seasons ago-takes no

prisoners. He's anxious to simplify After

the Fall , whatever its flaws. The men reveal no subtext; the women are all

one-dimensional nags, Oedipal smotherers and slags-except for Holga (played by

the refined Vivienne Benesch), where there's no choice.

Holga is Mr. Miller's all-too-saintly German savior and anti-Nazi

guide to the concentration camps. "Why does something in me bow its head like

an accomplice in this place!" Quentin exclaims melodramatically during a visit

to one of the camps with Holga. An accomplice ?

For heaven's sake, he's unhappily married! The hell with it, life's not so bad.

He's having an affair with Marilyn Monroe! He'll probably have an affair with

Holga, too. He might even marry her

one day ….

Disguised autobiography or no, it isn't a crime for Arthur Miller

to have written a play that doesn't work. For him to bloat After the Fall with biblical allusions is a bridge too far. For the

director to add Freud is another story. But when a playwright of Mr. Miller's

stature confuses the angst caused by a muddled sex life with the death camps,

it's time to call it a night, yes?