After the Fall

I have never been an Arthur Miller fan. There. I've put the admission into print and probably branded myself as an illiterate rube.

In my junior year in high school, I had secretly made the decision I was going to be a star on Broadway. I knew my parents would never approve, so I tried to be as discrete about the decision as possible. Of course being in virtually every play that held an audition within a thirty mile radius of our home might not qualify as discrete to some, but I liked to think of it as living on the edge.

In preparation for impending stardom, I joined the Fireside Theatre. In the days before the Internet, the only exposure a young boy stranded in the cornfields of Iowa had to "real" theatre was the Sunday New York Times and the Fireside Theatre. Fireside Theatre was a magical oasis of culture, book club that allowed you to join for a penny and provided you with an introductory selection of plays, with the agreement to buy five or six at the regular price the next couple years. I thought I was pretty slick. My five selections were all five thick anthologies. For one penny, I managed to purchase forty classic plays. One of these anthologies being the best works of Arthur Miller. That summer I consumed Miller, Williams, O'Neill, Shakespeare, Shaw, the collected theatrical works of Agatha Christie, and a collection of the great American musicals. Only God knew when I would be summoned to play one of those great roles in a Broadway production on a moment's notice, and I had to be ready.

Williams and Shaw became passions. The musicals were fun. Shakespeare a struggle, and Williams and O'Neill a duty. (The less said about Christie, the better.) I felt like I got The Crucible, if not exactly appreciated it, but the rest of Miller left me cold. There weren't really any playable parts for a seventeen-year-old boy as I couldn't throw a football to save my life. I did a production of The Crucible in college, and felt that my time in Miller's world had been served. Years later I saw a production of All My Sons at the Raven Theatre and because of that brilliant production, deemed the script worthy. But I read After the Fall at age seventeen. I didn't get it, and didn't want to. "Slop," was my insightful summation. And I never looked back.

And then Eclipse added it to their season. Sigh. Last week I reluctantly sat down to slog my way through the script. I don't like to take pictures of scripts I don't know because I want to be able to add value to the process. And even though I was certain I'd much rather be pulling out my own molars, I felt a responsibility to at least be able to say I had looked at the script.

Then something very unexpected happened. Miller began to speak to me. Man to man. His story meant something to a middle-aged man that it couldn't possibly to a teenaged boy. And when Miller began to speak, I began to listen. And as I listened, the remnants of my actor instincts kicked in and I became intrigued by how to play the roles. By the end, I almost felt a yearning to give Miller another try.

The shoot was Saturday. Nothing specific had been planned, but I knew I'd have Quentin, Maggie, Louise, and Holga. However, when I walked into the room and met the actors playing the roles, the image came to me immediately. I knew instantly what I wanted to do, if not exactly how to execute it.

I shot Quentin holding each of the three women separately. Steve Scott, the director, had suggested individual marital portraits of the three couples. While doing three individual portraits would have been easy, I wanted a single image that summed up Quentin's relationships. Nat Swift, who plays Quentin, had a difficult time because he needed to hold the same pose for each woman. The acting and the relationship had to be defined by the poses of the women. I wanted some sort of blending of the images, but wasn't sure how to achieve it without making it look cheesy. The amount of distance between each of the women and Quentin was one of the keys. The difficulty was giving each woman her own space, and yet making the relationship with Quentin seem believable. As with the play, Maggie was the most difficult. She is a victim, and the ultimate victim for me is Faye Wray in King Kong. I asked Nora to strike that pose. It was not an easy pose for her to hold. The image I ended up using blended the body from one shot, the arm from another, and her face from a third.

Once the Maggie shot was done, the others were easy. Louise is pushing away from Quentin and Holga is his equal and accepts him as he is.

The real difficulty came in putting them together in some meaningful way, and the key for me was Nat's eye line. The base photo was Quentin holding Maggie. I had to piece the other two women into it. There was a lot of resizing and rotating the images so that they all looked like they might be originating from the same waist, even though the actresses hadn't posed that way. Had I been thinking, I might have had an easier time if I'd used a tripod. That way my perspective would have been constant and resizing and adjusting perspective for Helga and Louise wouldn't have been so difficult. It took about three hours to get all of the actresses into something of a believable perspective, and then to line their eyes up so that it would look like Quentin could be looking at any one of the three.

Once the photo was done, I was not happy. It looked like a Photoshop mess, even though I intellectually understood what was going on in the picture, it didn't resonate. The images were too realistic. Turning it into a graphic representation was embarrassingly easy. Anyone with a modicum of Photoshop skill will look at it and sneer. I had wanted something very Warhol. But if there is one thing I've learned over the years, it's when to stop. The texture is right. So, it wasn't a complex process. It's effective.

In the end, the image isn't what I had originally expected. But it may be better. Much like Miller's work, it speaks to me in an unexpected way and I'm surprised at how satisfying it really is. It may just be possible that Miller taught me more than I realize.