Broke and Blue

By T.E. Kalem

THE AMERICAN CLOCK by Arthur Miller

"I was only 14 when the market collapsed," says the narrator-hero early in this drama, "but for us it fell apart in small pieces." In The American Clock, premiering at the Charleston, S.C., Spoleto Festival, Arthur Miller is picking up the pieces of a national trauma. The shock waves of the '29 crash and the ensuing Great Depression stunned families, businesses and an entire society, engulfing them in anguish, fear, hopeless unemployment and abject despair. The tremors are still felt.

Miller was 14 in 1929, so those years up to Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Inaugural ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself) form a personal psychodrama for him. He speaks with the authenticity of a war correspondent who saw men fall and whose vision was permanently altered by the experience. Calling the play "a mural for the theater inspired by Studs Terkel's Hard Times," Miller provides panoramic vignettes of just about everything one has read or heard of the period. The seemingly invincible princes of Wall Street get themselves wiped out overnight and take their suicidal plunges. Angry dairy farmers drown highways in milk. The haggard hour of the breadlines arrives as millions of blue-and white-collar workers find themselves obsolete. And, as the narrator puts it, "the habits of royalty spread into Brooklyn--the ancient noble question arose of how you paid the rent without money."

While the vignettes are interesting as social history, they diffuse attention, especially since a vast gallery of characters is involved. The pulse beat of the play, its sturdy, unfaltering heart, resides in three clearly autobiographical figures. The narrator-hero Lee (Peter Evans) is the young Miller on an ardent quest of selfdiscovery. His father Moe (John Randolph) is a proud man who has followed the immigrant path to affluence, only to suffer the humiliating descent to penury. Miller has always been an astute observer of how a man's dignity is emasculated when he loses his economic self-respect, and Ran dolph is shatteringly poignant in this role.

As Lee's mother Rose, Joan Copeland is a fountain of humor, a river of love, and a rock of survival, despite occasional attacks of frayed nerves. Perhaps Miller's real time machine is memory and its curving flight into the distant past of one's fledgling manhood.

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