About the Play:

The Ride Down Mount Morgan has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

The Ride Down Mount Morgan is a full-length drama by Arthur Miller. A car wreck on the slopes of Mount Morgan puts an insurance tycoon in the hospital. While he recovers, two women meet in the hospital waiting room only to discover that they are both married to him. Now his past, bigamy and all, has caught up with him. Moving between broad farce and delicate tragedy, The Ride Down Mount Morgan explores the struggle between honesty with others and honesty with oneself.

The Ride Down Mount Morgan is about a successful businessman whose life goes off the tracks when his two wives accidentally meet in Arthur Miller's examination of the cost of shameless individualism. Lyman Felt's desires have allowed him to believe that loving – and marrying – two women is the kind of love that is totally truthful, and that he is being true to himself. When found out, his wives clarify the position: Only by deceiving everyone, has he found a way to his own false sense of truth. Driving down Mount Morgan in a snowstorm, he crashes his car and ends up in the hospital. While lying in the hospital, his two wives, living in different cities and unaware of their bigamous connection, come to his side. They are shocked and devastated, as are the children who once adored Lyman, and now verge on despising him. As we follow the chain of events that lead up to this day, what is revealed is a selfish man, willing to take, while others around him are willing to give and to turn a blind's eye to suspicions. We also feel the indictment of a society that urges us to give meaning to our life by individually defining it only for ourselves. In the end, Lyman is left by those who once loved him, and he must face the loneliness he now knows is his real, true self.

The Ride Down Mount Morgan premiered in 1991 at London's Wyndham's Theatre and opened on Broadway in 2000 at the Public Theater. It was nominated for a Tony award and a Drama Desk award. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been mounted by high schools, colleges, and community theatres.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male, with 1 musician

What people say:

"Ride Down Mount Morgan has an elegiac dignity…." — The New York Times

"Ride Down Mount Morgan will be up there with the best of them. It is an amazingly fresh play…It is witty, beautifully written, and naughtily provocative. Eventually it should make you think more than it makes you laugh, and it makes you laugh plenty." — New York Post

"… Ride Down Mount Morgan has a lot of profound and humorous insights as to why relationships are essential, yet difficult to maintain… features some of Miller's best writing in decades." — New York Daily News

"Everyone is vulgar and hilarious, selfish and giving, ridiculous and quite grand in this generous play about the tragic and wondrous unknowability of the human creature." — New York Newsday

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.