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...