Arthur Miller, Old Hat at Home, Is a London Hit

Any new play by Arthur Miller is an important event in American culture. One as theatrically bold and intellectually subtle as The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is reason to shout for joy. Robustly funny, full of fantasy and hallucination yet easy to follow, it is free of the world-weary, elegiac tone of the four slight one-acts that had been Miller's sole stage output in the previous decade. At 76, the playwright has recaptured the vigorous voice and zest of middle age and has found a fresh, indeed engagingly oddball, way to revisit his accustomed theme of how to assess rugged individualism -- as personal integrity or as social irresponsibility. Only one fact jars: this world premiere is delighting audiences not on Broadway but in London's West End. Says Miller: "They have a theater culture here in Britain. I don't think we do in New York City anymore. American commercial theater is dead. Why pretend that it isn't?"

It is the common fate of playwrights to flower early, then fade from fashion long before they die and spend decades enduring agonizing public reappraisal of their early triumphs. That has been Miller's lot in the U.S., where commercial producers mostly write him off as a shopworn social reformer. In Britain Mt. Morgan is his 13th play to be seen in the West End in the past dozen years. Moreover, British critics and audiences accept him as the poetic expressionist he sees in himself, rather than the earnest realist that U.S. productions relentlessly turn him into. "In London," he says, "audiences and critics are not so bound to familiar forms, and I've been able to demonstrate that the works have contemporary validity. I would hope, if this play succeeds here, that people will say, 'Why does he have to go to London?' But I fear the lesson won't be drawn."

Something other than realism is unmistakable from the opening moments of Mt. Morgan. The title refers to an automobile skid in mid-blizzard that has left . the central character, an aging insurance entrepreneur, physically shattered and confined to a hospital bed. Yet this wreckage of a man rises, leaving behind the outline of his slung and plastered body, to pace the stage and engage other characters in conversations he recalls, conversations he imagines, conversations he wants to have, and sometimes conversations he daydreams about in the midst of other conversations.

There is almost no conventional plot. The accident, which may not have been an accident, exposes a tense situation: the businessman has two wives and families. The play ends with that conflict deliberately unresolved. The chief revelations occur in flashback, and the play's hallucinatory nature makes them all a little suspect.

The businessman may lament losing contact with an illegitimate son he may have had by still another woman. Equally, he may have concocted this story just to dissuade his second wife from having an abortion. The man seemingly believes that on safari he once faced down a charging lion, which sniffed and retreated in apparent acknowledgment of a fellow animal presence. But the memory may be a mere metaphor for the kind of masculinity he is trying to keep alive. The facts ultimately matter far less than the moral dilemma: whether to mire oneself in dull decency, like the nice nurse whose family can devote a whole conversation to the merits of new shoes, or succumb to seductive selfishness.