(Page 5 of 6) In a biography of Monroe, Maurice Zolotow wrote that Mr. Miller had "to give up his entire time to attend to her wants." He was once asked if he had resented having to care for her to the detriment of his work. "Oh, yeah," he answered. "After the Fall," his most overtly autobiographical play, brought Mr. Miller a storm of criticism when it was produced in 1964, shortly after Monroe's death. The play, which had been written soon after the collapse of their marriage, implies a search for understanding of his responsibility toward her, of her inability to cope, and of his failure to help her. He insisted that he was dealing with large human themes and professed surprise when critics noted the resemblance between Monroe and Maggie, the drug-addicted, blond-wigged protagonist in the play, and accused him of capitalizing on Monroe's fame and defiling her image. "The play," he said at the time, "is a work of fiction. No one is reported in this play. The characters are created as they are in any other play in order to develop a coherent theme, which in this case concerns the nature of human insight, of self-destructiveness and violence toward others." And although many of the characters were seen as thinly veiled, he said they resembled real people "neither more nor less than in any other play I ever wrote." Almost no one took his explanations at face value, and some of his critics considered the play a cruel way of getting even, not only with Marilyn Monroe but also with her teachers from the Actors Studio, Paula and Lee Strasberg, who came in for Mr. Miller's special contempt. Similar criticisms were voiced when Mr. Miller's last play, "Finishing the Picture," was produced at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in the fall of 2004. The play depicted the making of the movie "The Misfits." But "After the Fall" did occasion Mr. Miller's reunion with Kazan, the most insightful director of his work. It was brought about by Whitehead, one of the architects of the ambitious plan to create an American repertory theater company as part of the new Lincoln Center complex. In his autobiography, "A Life," Kazan wrote, "Once brought together, Art and I got along well - even though I was somewhat tense in his company, because we'd never discussed (and never did discuss) the reasons for our 'break.' " "After the Fall" was the inaugural production of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, although the new Vivian Beaumont Theater was not finished in time and the company's first season was produced elsewhere. Mr. Miller contributed a second play, "Incident at Vichy," to the following season, but it, too, was poorly received. In 1965, Mr. Miller accepted the presidency of PEN International, the association of poets, editors, essayists, novelists and other literary figures, and he became increasingly active in defending the rights of writers. He was fond of recalling an appeal he received in 1966 to send some sort of message to Gen. Yakubu Gowon, who was about to take over the Nigerian government, to save the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who was facing execution. Mr. Miller wrote that when the general saw his name he asked "with some incredulity whether I was the writer who had been married to Marilyn Monroe and, assured that that was so, ordered Soyinka released." "How Marilyn would have enjoyed that one!" he added. Mr. Soyinka went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. In Politics Mr. Miller, who had spoken against the Vietnam War in 1965 at the first teach-ins on the subject at the University of Michigan, was also active in local political affairs in Connecticut and was elected to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1968. In 1967, he published a book of short stories, "I Don't Need You Any More," and continued to write plays. "The Price," a drama about two brothers, one a successful surgeon, the other a police officer who had given up the chance for a more promising career to support his father, was a modest commercial success and received some critical praise. Both success and praise would become increasingly elusive in the years that followed, even as Mr. Miller's works began to appear Off Broadway. --

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