About the Play:

The American Clock has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues and Female/Male Scenes.

The American Clock is a full-length drama by Arthur Miller is based loosely on Stud's Terkel's well-known oral history, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. A businessman and his family, including his son who dreams of being a writer, are hit hard by the Great Depression in Arthur Miller's semi-autobiographical play about hope, idealism and real people with an indomitable spirit to survive and prevail. Especially recommended for school and contest use.

The American Clock follows the lives of the men and women who have to balance hope and despair while struggling through one of the most far-reaching social calamities in history – the Great Depression of the thirties – and who, against all odds, maintain their belief in the American Dream. Set in 1929 New York City, the stock market crashes and a generation's lives are changed forever. In an American society governed by race and class, we meet the Baum family (obvious stand-ins for Miller's own family) as they navigate the aftermath of an unprecedented financial crisis. The central figures are businessman-turned-salesman Moe and music-loving Rose Baum and their aspiring sportswriter son Lee, a wealthy family whose fortune has vanished in the stock market crash. When Lee leaves Brooklyn and travels west in search of work, he comes face to face with the true scope of the Depression's devastation and encounters a tapestry of interlocked stories unfolding across a nation in crisis. Subtitled a mural for the theatre, the play employs a series of vignettes and short scenes, with the actors portraying some fifty-two characters, to capture the sense and substance of America in the throes of the Great Depression: a shoeshine man, a corporate tycoon, a dispossessed farmer, a struggling prostitute, a young songwriter, and a communist comic-strip artist, among many disparate American identities. Facing an unforgiving future in a once-familiar world, this adventurous play follows a broken community as they summon the courage to work out how to live. All the while, The American Clock ticks towards a new era in history, and time is running out for the Baums and the America they know.

The American Clock premiered in 1980 at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and then opened on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre. This brilliantly theatrical, kaleidoscopic study of America during the early years of the Great Depression constitutes a major work by one of theatre's truly important writers. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and it is an ideal choice college, high school, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 9 female, 15 male

What people say:

"After far too long an interlude, Arthur Miller is back in touch with his best subject, the failure of the American dream, and back on top of his talent." — The New York Times

"…the same kind of intimate, inner-voice writing that made Death Of A Salesman a masterpiece." — New York Post

"It's warm, funny, interesting…." — Variety

"...it has stood the test of time and now emerges ... as one of Miller’s best plays: an exploration of our need for sustaining illusions because, as he himself wrote, the truth is too terrible to face." — The Guardian

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.