About the Play:

After the Fall has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Male Scenes.

After the Fall is a full-length drama by Arthur Miller. The central figure is Quentin, a lawyer who examines his life and failed marriage to determine whether he should marry again. In the context of a memory play, Quentin's life leaps between the Great Depression, the Second World War and the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, in an autobiographical play said to be partly based on Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Especially recommended for school and contest use.

After the Fall probes deeply into the psyche of Quentin, a successful lawyer in New York searching for self-knowledge who ruthlessly revisits his past to explain the catastrophe that is his life. His journey backward takes him through a troubled upbringing, the bitter death of his mother, and a series of failed relationships. One of these is an ill-fated marriage to the charming and beautiful Maggie, who went from operating a switchboard to become a sexy, self-destructive entertainer everyone wanted a piece of – not unlike Marilyn Monroe, who was Arthur Miller's second wife. After the Fall is a powerful and moving study of a contemporary man struggling to come to terms with himself and his world by probing back into the revealing and often painful events of his past.

As Howard Taubman outlines the play: "At the outset Quentin emerges, moves forward and seats himself on the edge of the stage and begins to talk, like a man confiding in a friend. In the background are key figures in his life, and they move in and out of his narrative. The narration shades into scenes, little and big. They are revelations and illuminations. They remind Quentin of an awkward young girl whom he made proud of herself. They bring the tortured image of his mother's death and another of his mother's fury with his father, who lost all in trying to save a floundering business. They crisscross through his relations with a number of women — the first wife who wanted to be a separate person, the second who drove him into a separateness and a possible third who knew, as a German raised in a furnace of concentration camps, that 'survival can be hard to bear.' These intertwining images bring back the memories of inquisition when men were asked to name names of those who had joined with them in a communism that they mistook for a better future…After the Fall is a pain-wracked drama; it is also Mr. Miller's maturest…For to sit in Mr. Miller's theater is to be in an adult world concerned with a search that cuts to the bone."

After the Fall was the initial offering of New York's Lincoln Center Repertory Theater. It is often called the most autobiographical of Arthur Miller's plays, and Maggie as an unflinching portrait of Miller's ex-wife Marilyn Monroe, only two years after her suicide. But in its psychological acuity and depth, and its brilliant, dreamlike structure, it is a literary, and not just biographical, masterpiece.

After the Fall premiered in 1964 at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre on Broadway in New York City. Frequently revived on Broadway, it has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is a staple in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions

Cast: 3 female, 12 male

What people say:

"Rejoice that Arthur Miller is back with a play worthy of his mettle." — The New York Times

"A beautiful, remarkable play." — New York World-Telegram & Sun

"…strong, moving, and perceptive…." — New York Post

About the Playwright:

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) is considered one of the great American playwrights. During the Depression, finances were scarce and he paid for his college tuition by working as a shipping clerk in a New York factory. He later wrote his first plays in college. With a career that spanned over 50 years, he wrote more than thirty plays that transformed American Theatre and proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times. His probing dramas received many awards in his lifetime, including two Emmy awards and three Tony Awards for his plays, a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949, for Death of a Salesman.