Resources

Subsidized Theater (1947). “We do have the playwrights. What we don’t have is a Theatre.”
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949). “I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.”
The ‘Salesman’ Has a Birthday (1950). “There is no limit to the expansion of the audience’s imagination so long as the play’s internal logic is kept inviolate.”
Journey to ‘The Crucible’ (1953). “[T]he great rock, standing mum over the Bay, the splintered precipice on which the gibbet was built. The highway traffic endlessly, mindlessly humming at its foot, but up here the barrenness, the clinkers of broken stones, and the vast view of the bay; here hung Rebecca, John Proctor, George Jacobs…”
Global Dramatist (1957). “[It] is remarkable how similar the fundamental preoccupations are around the world. The dilemmas of my characters turn out to be quite familiar elsewhere.”
Topics: On the Shooting of Robert Kennedy (1968). “Here is a people that would rather clutch hatred to its heart than stretch out a hand in brotherhood to the black man and the poor man. That is why there is violence.”
On the Moon Landing (1969). Consider the “two schools of thought on the moon landing. One heralds it as the start of a new Age of Discovery like the period that began in 1492. The other regards it as a distraction from social problems.”
Rip Van Winkle Spanish-Style (1972). A review of Ronald Fraser’s “In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes . . . aspellbinding story of a man who concealed himself inside his own house for 30 years (1939-69) to avoid execution by the Franco regime.”
School Prayer: A Political Dirigible (1984). “One looks, as they say, in vain across the world for an example of a country improved by the identification of its government with religion, which this new gimmick most definitely will do in the mind of the American child.”
The Face in the Mirror: Anti-Semitism Then and Now (1984). An essay adapted from the introduction to his novel, “Focus”: “It is inevitable that one should wonder whether anything like the situation in this novel could recur, and it is a question no one can answer.”
The Mad Inventor of Modern Drama (1985). A review of Olof Lagercrantz’s biography of August Strindberg: “Lagercrantz does not stoop to sparing his subject and perhaps that is why, by the last chapters of his absorbing and profound biography of the great 19th-century Swedish author, the question of admiration or condemnation simply ceases to exist.”
Death in Tiananmen (1989). “[The] young Chinese, the future of China, are trying to keep alive the spirit that I was privileged to have seen awakening six years ago when the very idea of staging an American play in Beijing was close to incredible.”
Again They Drink From the Cup of Suspicion (1989). On a revival of “The Crucible”: “I did not write ‘The Crucible’ simply to propagandize against McCarthyism.”
Uneasy about the Germans. (May 6, 1990)
Get It Right. Privatize Executions. (1992). Op-ed.
We’re Probably in an Art That Is — Not Dying (1993) Based on comments from the 92nd St. Y: “The theater culture in this city has been dispersed. It’s been going on for about 25 years now, and I think it has almost completed its devolution.”
Let’s Privatize Congress (1995). Op-ed.
Salem Revisited (1998). Op-ed concerning President Clinton: “Despite the lashings of almost all the press and the mullahs of the religious right, the people seem largely to have withheld their righteous anger. This did not happen in Salem.”
The Past and Its Power: Why I Wrote ‘The Price’ (1999). “‘The Price’. . . a reaction to two big events that had come to overshadow all others in that decade. One was the seemingly permanent and morally agonizing Vietnam War, the other a surge of avant-garde plays that to one or another degree fit the absurd styles.”