In 1990 Arthur Miller was seventy-five years old. He might have been forgiven for settling into a cosy retirement. Henrik Ibsen wrote his last play at seventy-one while Samuel Beckett produced little after he was sixty. His public career had already lasted forty-six years, longer than those of Chekhov, Strindberg, Brecht, O’Neill, or Williams. Yet the 1990s proved his most prolific period since the 1960s. By the middle of the decade he had written three new plays, a film script for The Crucible, which began shooting in late 1995, and a novella published as Homely Girl, in the United States, and Plain Girl, in the United Kingdom. He continued to monitor the political situation, writing articles to The New York Times, supporting censored and imprisoned writers and traveling widely. He was, in other words, what he had been for the previous five decades, an active participant in theatrical, political, and social life.

He began the decade with a new play. In 1991 he opened The Ride Down Mount Morgan in London, a choice in part determined by the director’s availability but in part by a deepening despair over Broadway’s decline and in particular the determining power of money, whether that related to production costs or the unwillingness of actors to desert Hollywood for New York.