After the Fall (play)
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After the Fall is a play by American dramatist Arthur Miller. The original performance opened in New York City on January 23, 1964, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Barbara Loden and Jason Robards Jr., with a cameo appearance by Faye Dunaway. Kazan also collaborated with Miller on the script. It is one of Miller's most personal plays, a thinly veiled personal critique centered around Miller's recently failed marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
The plot takes place inside the mind of Quentin, a New York Jewish intellectual who decides to reexamine his life in order to determine if he should marry his most recent love, Holga.
The play is often criticised for being too similar to Miller's actual life because Maggie's suicide is very similar to the suicide of Miller's once wife, Marilyn Monroe. In fact the feelings of the protagonist, Quentin, are often believed to be Miller's own reflection about his failed marriage. Although this work remains very unpopular to critics, it is revered in the academic arena as a deep and intellectual play, albeit difficult to follow since it does not follow the conventional sequence of events found in typical works.
The play remains one of Miller's less popular works, often attributed in part to the non-linear, often surreal nature of the plot and setting, as well as the spartan, unconventional backdrop.[citation needed] Indeed, all but the final seconds of the play take place in the protagonist's brain, which is reflected by a set consisting of a single chair before a concentration camp guard tower, which is itself surrounded by a giant, winding ramp made up of crevices, pits, and abutments. The plot unfolds over a period of time, due to the non-linear nature of the story; characters and occurrences appear as the protagonist remembers them, and, reflecting the nature of the mind, they often disappear and their stories remain unresolved until later in the play, when they spontaneously reappear again.
Barbara Loden won the 1964 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play, and Jason Robards was nominated for, but did not win, the 1964 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play.
A television production of the play was shown in 1974. It starred Faye Dunaway, Christopher Plummer, Bibi Andersson and a young Brooke Shields. [1]
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