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I had admired Mr. Dennehy — who died on Wednesday, at 81 — as a smart, risk-taking and undersung actor onstage and onscreen. He was a heartbreakingly sensitive lout as the parvenu Lopakhin — a brute with a touch of the poet — in Peter Brook’s production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (1988) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His performance as the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy in the 1992 television film “To Catch a Killer” was a penetratingly human portrait of a monster, and it haunted my nightmares for a long time. But nothing I had seen Mr....

How did Salem, Massachusetts become a Halloween destination? For centuries, the New England town avoided any association with its infamous Puritan ancestors, who executed 19 people under suspicion of practicing witchcraft. The surprising answer, author Stacy Schiff writes for The New York Times, has a lot to do with the sitcom "Bewitched." These days, Salem is rife with kitschy witches and Halloween attractions. But before the late 20th century, town citizens rarely acknowledged the Puritan trials. When playwright Arthur Miller visited Salem to research "The Crucible" in 1952, locals refused to help him. "You couldn't get anyone to say anything...

October 17, 2015 is the centenary of the birth of Arthur Miller, one of the literary left’s shining lights and righteous crusaders against some of liberals’ worst demons: Joe McCarthy, “HUAC,” and, more generally, anti-communism. Yes, anti-communism. As often noted by Harvard’s Richard Pipes and the Hoover Institution’s Robert Conquest, few things have animated liberal animus quite like anti-communism. It’s not that liberals have been pro-communist so much as they are anti-anti-communist. They dislike anti-communists more than they dislike communists. Their preferred demon isn’t Joe Stalin but Joe McCarthy. As James Burnham, the great ex-communist, put it, “for the left,...

IOWA CITY - A University of Iowa political science professor faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted of offering good grades in exchange for sexual favors from four female students. Arthur H. Miller, 66, was charged with four counts of accepting bribes, a Class C felony. He was taken to the Johnson County Jail on Friday afternoon and released on his own recognizance. Miller is accused of offering to improve grades for four students in exchange for favors from May 8 through May 13. Attempts to reach Miller were unsuccessful. On May 8, according to a police complaint,...

It's been a while since we've checked out the Pop Culture. Let us visit the "freegans", you read right…not vegans, but freegans. Also a $14K dessert, the notion of paying people to raise their children properly and the fine fellow who put a rattlesnake in his mouth to impress a girl. He MIGHT live.

It looks as if the media will have to find another pretentious intellectual to refer to as “the conscience of the American theater” (according to The Boston Globe), “the moralist of the American theater” (The New York Times), and, most gratuitously, “the moralist of the past American century” (The Denver Post). In fact, given their track record, elitist intellectuals should probably refrain from using the word “moralist” altogether. Those words were written about Arthur Miller, the playwright who became famous by penning dreary plays about America’s alleged failures. Miller’s pompous liberalism has been forced upon high school and college students...

PC Dead White Guy by: Malcolm A. Kline, September 04, 2007 Believe it or not, there is at least one deceased Caucasian man of letters still revered in academia—playwright Arthur Miller, whose dramas attacked both capitalism and the American way of life even while he personally benefited from both. Thus, it is with a heavy heart that media figures report on the son with Downs Syndrome whom their sensitive hero institutionalized but never publicly acknowledged. “What makes the revelation of Daniel so upsetting is how it juxtaposes Miller’s private decision with his public image, as one of the greatest American...

I must confess that I never liked playwright Arthur Miller's work, even though I never really publicly criticized it. As an Ivy-educated, Ivy-employed intellectual, I was supposed to think he was deep. All the right people agreed on that point. So I sat through performances of his most famous work, Death of a Salesman, on several occasions, in the company of my parents at first, and as a season ticket holder at a couple of repertory theatres in adulthood. But I always found Death to be tedious and pretentious. The author must have been a rather unpleasant man, I would...

Arthur Miller, who died in February 2005, [and Inge Morath] had a son born with Down syndrome in 1966. Soon after, they made the painful decision to put the child, Miller’s youngest, in an institution for the mentally retarded before Miller essentially cut him out of his life. Ms. Andrews describes in detail how Miller rarely, if ever, accompanied his wife on weekly visits to see Daniel, almost never mentioned him to shocked friends and didn’t mention him in his memoir, “Timebends.” The picture that emerges is of a father in denial and a son who has moved on to...

What the liberal obits missed: Miller as willing Soviet pawn... "Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89." The New York Times' adulatory front-page obituary was typical. Indeed, within hours of Miller's passing February 10, the famed playwright was receiving rousing reviews for his prodigious literary output that won him a Pulitzer, four Tony awards and a flock of other honors. The man who had once married Marilyn Monroe was lavishly celebrated for several important dramas, including All My Sons (1947), Death of A Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View From the Bridge (1955). He had...

"Attention must be paid." That's the line — the big line from "Death of a Salesman." And, if you missed it this last week or so, well, you weren't paying attention. It was the headline in the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times: "Attention must be paid." California's Contra Costa Times went with: " 'Attention must be paid' to playwright." And The Chicago Tribune saved it for the slow-motion elephantine punchline of its opening paragraph: "The Man who wrote 'Death of a Salesman' died Thursday. And attention must be paid." Click to learn more... In Britain, where they've...

Attention must be paid. That's the line — the big line from ''Death of a Salesman.'' And, if you missed it this last week or so, well, you weren't paying attention. It was the headline in the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times: ''Attention Must Be Paid.'' California's Contra Costa Times went with: '' 'Attention Must Be Paid' To Playwright.'' And the Chicago Tribune saved it for the slow-motion elephantine punchline of its opening paragraph: ''The Man who wrote 'Death of a Salesman' died Thursday. And attention must be paid.'' In Britain, where they've built an Arthur Miller...

I see that Arthur Miller has entered immortality. His Death of a Salesman is a masterpiece of the first magnitude. An essay he wrote in 1974 about Richard Nixon entitled "One of Us" argued that Nixon had ruined himself by refusing to admit that he had human faults and then, when those faults were revealed, Nixon was ruined by the comparison against the template he had created. Nixon, Miller argued, was really just "one of us" with all our flaws. It was a brilliant piece and I feel the same way about Arthur Miller. He wrote a great play about...

New HampshireAttention must be paid. That’s the line. And if you missed it this last week, well, you weren’t paying attention. It was the headline in the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times: ‘Attention Must Be Paid.’ California’s Contra Costa Times went with: ‘“Attention Must Be Paid” To Playwright’. And the Chicago Tribune saved it for the slow-motion elephantine punchline of its opening paragraph: ‘The man who wrote Death of a Salesman died Thursday. And attention must be paid.’ In Britain, they paid even more attention. For a couple of decades, the National Theatre’s given the impression it...

Arthur Miller wasn't well-liked – and for good reason. New York – The bells tolled for Arthur Miller all weekend long — but most of them were made of tin. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, led with a two-liner so flat it could have closed out of town: "The man who wrote 'Death of a Salesman' died Thursday. And attention must be paid." (If you don't recognize the most famous line of Miller's most famous play, first produced in 1949, consider yourself young.) Elsewhere, overstatement was the order of the day. The British director David Thacker said that "if you...

Miller's weaknesses as a dramatist are also latent in this play. I hope I never have to sit through Death of a Salesman again, not because it's depressing and bleak but because it's unrelieved and unchallenging. As a dramatist, Miller not only has no sense of humor, he also fails to grasp how changes in tone and texture can be used to make tragedy tolerable. Here, as in his other plays, he seems terrified that someone might accuse him of

NEW YORK (AP) - Arthur Miller, whose dramas of fierce moral and personal responsibility such as "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible" made him one of the 20th century's greatest playwrights, has died at the age of 89. Miller, died Thursday night of congestive heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Conn., surrounded by his family, his assistant, Julia Bolus, said Friday. For decades, the playwright, along with Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, dominated not only American stages, but theaters throughout the world. Broadway marquees were to dim their lights Friday night at curtain time. "It is the loss...

ROXBURY, Conn. (AP) -- Award-winning author and playwright Arthur Miller has died. NO URL YET.