About the Play:

Mr. Peters' Connections is a full-length drama by Arthur Miller. Within the confines of his mind, Mr. Peters is an aging former airline pilot to whom the world is not quite what it was, nor, he suspects, is he. Mr. Peters' Connections is about a man at the end of his life who feels things slipping away from him. Haunted by the past, Mr. Peters finds his grasp on the day-to-day elusive, and the future simply unfathomable.

Mr. Peters' Connections follows a retired pilot who finds himself in a mysterious time and place where he faces challenging questions about compassion, love, sex and war. Harry Peters walks into an old club, greeting what may be an old friend or a long lost brother. The club brings back memories, or creates them, and even though he is not sure which, he is there for a reason: to find out something about himself. He often asks, "What is the subject?" as if trying to prompt the answers to life-long questions out of the walls and dusty chairs. A piano plays old music. A middle-aged homeless lady, who is a figment of Peters' imagination and one of Arthur Miller's most original characters, sits in the back and occasionally makes remarks. He is visited by his wife, or is it? He is visited by a young couple, the woman reminding him of a lover and lustful past. He is visited by another couple who remind him of nothing until the young girl talks to him as his daughter would. Through it all, a trip to the powder room by the other characters creates a sensation of peace, but Harry won't go there, doesn't want to. Wants to avoid it. Is the powder room heaven after the nightclub purgatory? Is Harry struggling to stay in the real world and is this play a dream as he fights for his life? Is his search for a "subject" the same as our search for meaning in our lives? Perhaps.

Mr. Peters' Connections premiered in 1998 Off-Broadway at the Signature Theater with Peter Falk, best known as star of TV's "Colombo," returning to the New York stage after a 27-year absence as Mr. Peters. Since then the play was produced at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 1999 and opened in London at the Almeida Theatre in 2000.

Cast: 3 female, 5 male

What people say:

"A work of rare honesty and dignity." — New York Daily News

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.