Gloucester Stage to Celebrate Arthur Miller Centennial

Gloucester Stage proudly presents The Arthur Miller Centennial, a celebration of playwright Arthur Miller and his work in honor of his 100th birthday, on Saturday, October 17 at 7:30pm at Gloucester Stage, 267 East Main Street, Gloucester, MA. The audience is invited to enjoy birthday cake during a post-show reception with the cast and crew. Conceived by directing apprentice Allison Benko and stage management/production apprentice Jenna Worden, The Arthur Miller Centennial is a multimedia performance featuring recorded interviews with Miller himself as well as scenes from some of his best-known works including The Crucible, Death of a Salesmen, and After the Fall. Benko describes this special evening, "Arthur Miller is often called a quintessentially American playwright, and that might be true. But that's a dangerously broad blanket statement -- and what exactly does it mean? I think this production will be a way of asking that question. It's a way of asking what Arthur Miller means to us, today, one hundred years after his birth." The cast features local Boston performers including Kate Paulson and Sheridan Thomas, a professor at Tufts University.

Arthur Miller is considered one of the greatest American Playwrights of the 20th century. Born in Harlem, New York in 1915, Arthur Miller attended the University of Michigan before moving back East to write plays. His first critical and popular success was Death of a Salesman, which opened on Broadway in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize along with multiple Tony Awards. In 1953 he received more acclaim for his next play, the award-winning The Crucible, which mirrored his unwavering refusal to cooperate with the House of Un-American Activities Committee. His other plays include The Man Who Had All The Luck (1944), All My Sons (1947), A View >From The Bridge and A Memory Of Two Mondays (1955), After The Fall (1964), Incident At Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation Of The World And Other Business (1972), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), The American Clock (1980) and Playing For Time. Later plays include The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), Mr. Peters' Connections (1998), Resurrection Blues (2002), and Finishing The Picture (2004). Other works include "Focus," a novel (1945), "The Misfits," a screenplay (1960), and the texts for "In Russia" (1969), "In the Country" (1977), and "Chinese Encounters" (1979), three books in collaboration with his wife, photographer Inge Morath. Memoirs include "Salesman in Beijing" (1984) and "Timebends," an autobiography (1988). Short fiction includes the collection "I Don't Need You Anymore" (1967), the novella "Homely Girl, a Life" (1995) and "Presence: Stories" (2007). He was awarded the Avery Hopwood Award for Playwriting at University of Michigan in 1936. He won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award twice, received two Emmy awards and three Tony Awards for his plays, as well as a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He also won an Obie award, a BBC Best Play Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, a Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Algur Meadows Award. He was named Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001. He was awarded the 2002 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters and the 2003 Jerusalem Prize. He received honorary degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University and was awarded the Prix Moliere of the French theatre, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Arthur Miller died in 2005 at the age of 89.

The Arthur Miller Centennial is Saturday, October 17 at 7:30 pm at Gloucester Stage, 267 East Main Street, Gloucester, MA. The audience is invited to a post-show reception to enjoy birthday cake with the cast and crew. Tickets are $15 for the event. Tickets are $1 for ages 25 years and under for the event. The $1 tickets are cash only and available at the door on day of performance only. All performances are held at Gloucester Stage, 267 East Main Street, Gloucester, MA. For more information and to purchase tickets, call the Gloucester Stage Box Office at 978-281-4433 or visit www.gloucesterstage.com