MILLER/ Resurrection Blues: Looking for a Redeemer

The next to last play penned by the prolific American playwright Arthur Miller at age 86, Resurrection Blues (2002), centers on a mysterious Christ-like figure who never himself takes the stage. We are introduced to him through witnesses, both disciples and detractors. The setting is a third world country, and the plan is to crucify the rabble rouser, the indirect cause of an uprising, with the dictator ready to pocket a handsome royalty for worldwide media rights to the sensational event. The play was in the first draft stage when the question of broadcasting the execution of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was raised.

Arthur Miller is best known for his plays Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and was at one time married to Marilyn Monroe. In 1956, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to identify communists he knew. When he refused, he was charged with contempt of Congress, a conviction overturned two years later. 

The play was performed first at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2002 with Miller’s collaboration. The playwright continued to work on the script until his death in 2005.  Other showings followed at the Old Globe in San Diego, at the Old Vic under director Robert Altman amid controversy, and in Chicago at the Eclipse Theatre. Most recently, the play was staged at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. 

The critics have given mixed reviews, varying in part with the interpretation of the particular productions. According to New York Times critic Bruce Weber, it is “a bitter comedy about the world that the American century wrought, and it essentially says that we have bollixed things up so badly that a Messiah has no chance; God has fled.” For Chicago Theatre Beat critic Scotty Zacher, the message is more complex and open-ended: “Miller’s morality tale gets to have it all–worldly cynicism and the possibility of real love, truth told to power and power confessing its own grasping frailties, rage unleashed against stupefying oppression and holy relief from desiccating anger, overwhelming doubt and unyielding faith, and miracles, miracles in the most impossible places–especially in the most impossible places.”

The setting is a society where revolutionary ideologies have failed, former guerillas now deal drugs, and mass media and commercial interests prevail. Jeanine, a former rebel who witnessed the deaths of her co-revolutionists, has survived a recent suicide attempt and found healing and meaning through the man she met when she woke bloodied and broken on the sidewalk. After having failed, by her own account, at both revolution and dope, she discovers a new vision: “I felt transparent, and I saw so sharply, like a condor, a tiger…. And everything I saw seemed superbly precious and for a split second I think I believed in god. Or at least his eye, or an eye seeing everything so exactly.” And she is not the only one: whole mountain villages are enthralled.