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No Villian

No Villian
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
Author: Arthur Miller
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 59
Pub. Date: 2017
ISBN-10: 0822236508
ISBN-13: 9780822236504
Cast Size: 2 women, 6 men

About the Play:

No Villain is a full-length drama by Arthur Miller. This remarkable debut play shows a playwright at the beginning of his extraordinary career, grappling with the issues of labour and society as well as displaying the intra-family relationships that would come to define his entire body of work.

No Villain centres on the Simon family, an immigrant family with their own garment business who are staring down a workers’ strike that threatens to put them out of business. Over six days during spring break 1936 at the University of Michigan, a 20-year-old college sophomore wrote his first play No Villain. His aim was to win the prestigious Avery Hopwood Award and, more importantly, the $250 prize he needed in order to return to college the following year. Miller won the award, and the subsequent one, but the play was never produced until 2015. 

Arthur Miller himself said, "My first attempt at a play, rather inevitably, had been about industrial action and a father and his two sons, the most autobiographical dramatic work I would ever write." The play tells the story of a garment industry strike that sets a son against his father, a strike-plagued factory-owner whose struggle to survive the depredations of working life would be further explored – and refined – by Willy Loman in the classic drama Death of a Salesman.

Arthur Miller's gritty debut drama, No Villain premiered in 2015 to critical acclaim and sell-out performances at the Old Red Lion Theatre, a small fringe theatre above a north London pub. In 2016 the production transferred to a commercial run at Trafalgar Studios in London's West End.

Cast: 2 women, 6 men

What people say:

"…[No Villain] is recognisably the apprenticeship of a theatrical genius…Miller gives a sense of knowing where he was going from the start…Most startling, though, is to be shown the embryo of Death of a Salesman…[a] thrilling discovery…[a] gripping and intelligent drama…." — The Guardian (UK)

"…absolutely brilliant…Undiscovered early works are not invariably the best predictors of their author’s future fame, but No Villain is a remarkable exception…the urgent authenticity of the dialogue, the stifling account of the love, terror and resentment of a family in crisis, the desperation of ordinary men trying to survive in extraordinary times, are the work of a young writer who has already discovered his voice." — The Daily Telegraph (UK)

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.