The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

Rating:
Summary: A splendid ride indeed
Review: In Arthur Miller's splendid play, the main character Lyman Felt concludes that if you try to live according to your real desires, you have to end up looking like a s---. That's his explanation for never divorcing his first wife before marrying another. It's when his car crashes traveling down a snow covered Mt. Morgan that his double life is exposed. His two wives meet and the issues of fidelity, true love, deception and honesty are explored. Can a person remain true to himself and still always true to another? Arthur Miller poses wonderful food for thought in this witty, poignant masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: I know Willy Loman, and Lyman Felt . . .
Review: The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is an engaging play, one that provides the reader (or viewer) with as much food for thought, as amusement. Is it a masterpiece? No. Not by any stretch. Death of a Salesman is a masterpiece.

Lyman Felt is certainly a colorful character from whom we can learn much, not just about bigamists, but also about ourselves. He is not, however, a Willy Loman, a character so strongly defined that he's entrenched in the American (if not the world's) psyche. Felt effectively represents and helps us to understand (if not forgive) a specific type of man; Loman effectively represents the sometimes overwhelming frustrations any of us endures in pursuit of the elusive American dream.

Miller does succeed in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan by prompting us to consider what might motivate a man who constructs an elaborate network of lies in an attempt to keep two wives. In his own mind, Felt is justifiably keeping both women happy and (again, in his own mind) he loves them both so much, he couldn't stand to let either one go. For some time, he is quite successful in living these two lives.

After surviving an accident (or was it an accident?), however, both women arrive at the hospital to take care of him. Now that the deception is uncovered, the real damage unfurls; both wives know they can't trust him; both feel they were never truly loved; both are forced to make swift decisions, none of which are surprising or irrational given the circumstances. Although Felt is charming enough to win our affection, we still come away believing he pretty much gets what he deserves. I might be wrong. Maybe Felt does represent us all. Sure, few of us are bigamists; but maybe Felt really represents the very damaging, but human desire we all have to have your cake and eat it, too.

Rating:
Summary: Dysmas and Gestas.
Review: This is essentially the material of Kazan's The Arrangement arranged to formulate a conception of theater derived from After The Fall, and it shows the fruits of having written that monumental play. It takes two thirds of the play's length to get its mechanism functioning, and when it does it's a poetic surrealism of great flexibility and subtlety, capable of shifting planes of thought instantaneously, and provided with a set of cinematic flashbacks and evocations which happen in full view of the mind's eye of characters onstage, in a story of Christ between two thieves.