The PlayFinder™

Recipient of the 1953 Tony Award® for Best Play.

THE STORY: Widely considered a masterpiece, this timeless classic challenges American ideas of power, intolerance, and justice. In the Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts, a servant girl accuses a farmer’s wife of witchcraft. One accusation spirals into many, uncovering a web of bigotry and deceit that changes their lives forever. Among the most produced plays since its 1953 debut, THE CRUCIBLE is both a gripping historical d... Read more

As Howard Taubman outlines the play: "At the outset Quentin emerges, moves forward and seats himself on the edge of the stage and begins to talk, like a man confiding in a friend. In the background are key figures in his life, and they move in and out of his narrative. The narration shades into scenes, little and big. They are revelations and illuminations. They remind Quentin of an awkward young girl whom he made proud of herself. They bring the tortured image of his mother's ... Read more

Winner of the 1947 Tony Award® for Best Play

THE STORY: During the war Joe Keller and Steve Deever ran a machine shop which made airplane parts. Deever was sent to prison because the firm turned out defective parts, causing the deaths of many men. Keller went free and made a lot of money. The twin shadows of this catastrophe and the fact that the young Keller son was reported missing during the war dominate the action. The love affair of Chris Keller and Ann Deever, the bitternes... Read more

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. The central figures are the Baums, a wealthy family whose fortune has vanished in the stock market crash, but their story is amplified and illuminated by brief glimpses of other lives; a farmer who has lost all in the dust bowl; a prostitute who exc... Read more

The setting is an ornate room in a former Archbishop's palace in an Eastern European capital, a room which has probably been bugged by the secret police. The central character is a middle-aged author, Sigmund, who, having embarrassed the current regime, is faced with the choice of detention and punishment or defection to the West. He is encouraged in the latter by two of his former friends, also writers, his compatriot Marcus, an ex-political prisoner now in favor with the regi... Read more

Own every DPS published acting edition by Arthur Miller. This special collection of 21 plays is available at a 15% discount off the regular price.

Includes the following acting editions:
After the Fall
All My Sons
The American Clock... Read more

Brooklyn, New York. The end of November, 1938. Sylvia Gellberg has suddenly, mysteriously, become paralyzed from the waist down. As the play opens, her husband, Phillip, and her doctor, Dr. Hyman, meet to discuss the prognosis and test results. The doctor assures Phillip that physically, there is nothing wrong with his wife and that she is sane, but advises the only way to discover the cause of her paralysis is to probe into her psyche. At this point, the author begins to peel ... Read more

CLARA, is a powerful and moving drama in which an aging father is forced to come to grips with the crushing reality of his daughter's senseless murder. Grilled relentlessly by a dispassionate detective, the father is unable to bring his memory into focus until, in the trenchant monologue recalling a disquieting incident from his wartime experience, the past suddenly clarifies the present and, relieving the father's tortured conscience, unlocks the damning evidence which the det... Read more

Dividing his play into "three questions on the human dilemma," the author begins with a charming and gently humorous retelling of Adam and Eve (and God) in the Garden of Eden. After their expulsion from paradise, Eve gives birth to Cain, watched over by a scheming Lucifer—who seeks to share the power of a God now angered by the errant ways of his creations. In the concluding portion of the play, with mounting dramatic intensity, Cain kills his brother, Abel, and is sent out as ... Read more

The first play, I CAN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING, is a gentle, poignant study of two old friends, an elderly man and woman, who live in nearby houses and often take their meals together. She is a wealthy widow whose life seems to have come to a stop after her husband's death; he is a retired draftsman, a doctrinaire Communist who was her husband's best friend despite the radical differences in life styles and political outlook. Both lament the passing of better days, the lack of con... Read more

Winner of the 1949 Tony Award® for Best Play and the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

THE STORY: The story revolves around the last days of Willy Loman, a failing salesman, who cannot understand how he failed to win success and happiness. Through a series of tragic soul-searching revelations of the life he has lived with his wife, his sons, and his business associates, we discover how his quest for the "American Dream" kept him blind to the people who truly loved him. A thrilling w... Read more

A Man enters a small boutique, hoping to find a suitable gift for his young mistress, who is facing a grave operation. Unaccountably he quickly finds himself confiding in the Proprietress, speaking without hesitation of the pain he feels at having his telephone calls to his loved one unreturned, of his fear that her condition may be fatal. The Proprietress consoles him, suggesting that perhaps she wants to spare him, that she needs to face her ordeal alone and without added bur... Read more

A small Norwegian town has just begun to win fame and wealth through its medicinal spring waters. Dr. Stockmann, resident physician in charge, discovers that the waters are poisoned. On receiving proof of this, he immediately reports to his associates, but is shocked to find that instead of being thanked, he is looked upon as a dangerous crank, motivated by a desire to prove that his fellow townsmen are wrong, and to bring ruin upon them. As the people who run the local paper d... Read more

Set in 1522, THE GOLDEN YEARS revolves around Cortez's invasion of Mexico during Montezuma's reign. Written during the early stages of World War II, the conflict between the Spanish general and the Aztec king mirrors the relationship between Hitler and the leaders of the European states and America. Arthur Miller says of his play, "THE GOLDEN YEARS…[is a] look at passivity and its risks, but here the society as well as an individual is at stake. Montezuma, like the democracies ... Read more

The Golden Years. Set in 1522, THE GOLDEN YEARS revolves around Cortez's invasion of Mexico during Montezuma's reign. Written during the early stages of World War II, the conflict between the Spanish general and the Aztec king mirrors the relationship between Hitler and the leaders of the European states and America. Arthur Miller says of his play, "THE GOLDEN YEARS…[is a] look at passivity and its ... Read more

I CAN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING, is a gentle, poignant study of two old friends, an elderly man and woman, who live in nearby houses and often take their meals together. She is a wealthy widow whose life seems to have come to a stop after her husband's death; he is a retired draftsman, a doctrinaire Communist who was her husband's best friend despite the radical differences in life styles and political outlook. Both lament the passing of better days, the lack of contact with loved on... Read more

1942. The detention room of a police station in the occupied Vichy Zone. Eight men have been picked up for questioning, for the reason everyone knows but can’t begin to consider. As details of the consequences of the occupation, and of the Nazis’ Racial Program, begin to emerge, each man must consider for himself how he responds. In one of the clearest and most urgently moral plays by the greatest American moral dramatist, INCIDENT AT VICHY is a tense, incisive examination of ... Read more

Two men, one in his late-forties, the other twenty years older, meet in the waiting room of a New England state mental health facility only to discover that they have done business together in the past. Inside the facility, each of their wives recovers from a nervous breakdown. Leroy Hamilton, a descendent of founding father, Alexander Hamilton, has spent his life as a highly skilled carpenter. His wife, Patricia, the daughter of Swedish immigrants and herself the mother of sev... Read more

Leroy Hamilton is seated in the visiting room of a state mental hospital where his wife is having treatment. Forty-eight years old, he is dressed in Ivy League clothing and is looking through a magazine. He is a veteran of the visiting room, as his wife has been hospitalized a number of times over the years. Mr. Frick, a sixty-year-old solid businessman, enters. His wife is having treatment for the first time. Frick engages Leroy in conversation and it becomes obvious that he n... Read more

The play chronicles the rise of David Beeves from an auto mechanic to a successful mink rancher. However, while David's fortunes mount, the lives of those around him are in a constant decline. David desperately searches for some meaning to his good fortune and begins to wish that some great disaster would be visited upon him and break his chain of good luck. Mr. Miller views THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK as a reverse of the story of Job. He says of the play, "the story of a man ... Read more

Writing of A MEMORY OF TWO MONDAYS, John Chapman called it: "a one-act fragment about people who work in an automobile parts warehouse in the early Roosevelt days. Properly speaking, it has no plot—yet something does happen to almost everybody. A youth gets a chance to go to college. A drunk reforms. Another drunk rebels. A young man with a song in his soul finds himself forgetting the song as poverty and a lack of opportunity grind him down."

Somewhat Chekhovian in st... Read more

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 bag lady sits in the back and occasionally makes remarks. He is vis... Read more

Over six days during the spring break of 1936 at the University of Michigan, a twenty-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, but the play would remain buried until it received its world premiere nearly eighty years after it was written. NO VILLAIN tells the story of a garment industry... Read more

As outlined in Variety: "…the conflict, the basic jealousy and the lifetime of, if not hatred, at least corrosive, though unacknowledged anger, is between two brothers, as well as resentment against a selfish, child-devouring father. The siblings meet, after a sixteen-year estrangement, in the attic of the family residence, where the old furniture is to be disposed of. The first is a policeman who sacrificed his education and probably a career as a scientist to care for ... Read more

Lyman'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. While lying in the hospital, recovering from bad injuries after a car crash, Lyman's women meet. They are shocked and devastated, as are the children who once adored Lyman, and now verge on d... Read more

Angela, a hard-bitten call-girl, is visited by Tom, a private detective of long acquaintance, who is convinced that she can supply information about a murder case which, some years earlier, resulted in a miscarriage of justice. As Tom plays on their former closeness, trying to draw out the facts he seeks, Angela withdraws behind a schizophrenic screen of multiple personalities ranging from a brazen creature named Leontyne, to a shrinking violet called Emily, to a haughty Englis... Read more

As told by the New York Daily News, "… is a tragedy in the classic form and I think it is a modern classic…the central character is a long-shoreman who, though his mind is limited and he cannot find words for his thoughts, is an admirable man…When two of his wife's Italian cousins—submarines they are, in the waterfront argot—are smuggled into this country, he makes room for them in his home. Gratefully they move in among his wife, his children and the teen-age niece whom... Read more