The Last Yankee

Description

'When the play focuses on the self-entrapment of the characters, Mr. Miller can be tender as well as trenchant' NEW YORK TIMES Two strangers meet in a New England psychiatric clinic, each visiting their admitted, depressed wife: one is a humble carpenter with seven children, the other a successful businessman in a childless marriage; both have been forgotten by the promise of the American Dream. Described by Miller as 'a comedy about a tragedy', this one-act play highlights the devastating consequences for those who fail to achieve the purported riches of the American Dream; a reality many face. This Methuen Drama Student Edition is edited by Ciaran Leinster, with commentary and notes that explore the play's production history (including excerpts from an interview with director David Thacker) as well as the dramatic, thematic and academic debates that surround it.

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was arguably the greatest American playwright of the twentieth century. Hist most famous work for the stage includes Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons and A View from the Bridge. Six volumes of his plays and a volume of his theatre essays are published by Methuen Drama. Ciaran Leinster (volume editor) is a Dublin-based scholar, who teaches at University College Dublin, Ireland. His PhD at the University of Seville, Spain, focused on postmodernism in the late work of Arthur Miller. Susan C. W. Abbotson (series editor) is Professor of Dramatic Literature at Rhode Island College, USA.

A masterfully executed, haunting chamber piece * Guardian * The Last Yankee reasserts Miller's unquestionable dominance of American drama ... No other American playwright has had his range of experience and feeling; none has combined his magisterial moral judgement with his warm and forgiving sense of humour and his ability to inhabit completely, like Shakespeare or Ibsen, every character he creates. Miller writes with a sense of pain and laughter, with an understanding of the heart's endless struggle with the mind, which is characteristic of a writer on an unending journey of discovery. * Sunday Times * Afine and moving play ... Like all Miller's best work, it effortlessly links private and public worlds by connecting personal desperation to insane American values * Guardian * One of Miller's most intimate works in which an entire system seems to have left its casualties in need of collective medication * Herald Scotland * [This] passionate and subtle 75-minute play offers no easy answers to the profound questions it raises about what mental illness is, and how it can best be treated * Scotsman *