American Drama, Family/Domestic Drama, Love & Relationships - Drama

The Ride down Mount Morgan

Name: The Ride down Mount Morgan
Author: Arthur Miller
ISBN: 9780140482447

by Arthur Miller

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Overview

A car wreck on the slopes of Mt. Morgan puts poet and insurance tycoon Lyman Felt in the hospital. While Lyman recovers, two women meet in the hospital to discover that they are both married to him. With his secrets exposed, Lyman tries to justify himself to the two women—the prim, cultured Theo and the restless, ambitious Leah—at the same time hoping to convince himself that he is blameless. Moving between broad farce and delicate tragedy, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan reveals the struggle between honesty with others and honesty with oneself. This new edition incorporates the revisions Miller wrote for the acclaimed 1998 Public Theatre production starring Patrick Stewart.

Lyman Felt is in his late fifties. Driving down Mount Morgan in the snow, he crashes his car and is taken to a hospital. Summoned to his bedside are his daughter and his two wives. Now Lyman's past, and his appetites, have caught up to him. Comical, poignant, and provocative, The Ride Down Mount Morgan is Miller's first full-length play in a decade.

Synopsis

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 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.

NY Post

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.

About the Author, Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1963), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and The American Clock. He has also written two novels, Focus (1945), and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977), three books of photographs by his wife, Inge Morath. More recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), and the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season, and Mr. Peter's Connections (1998). His latest book is On Politics and the Art of Acting. Miller was granted with the 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

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Editorials

NY Daily News

...MOUNT MORGAN has a lot of profound and humorous insights as to why relationships are essential, yet difficult to maintain...MOUNT MORGAN features some of Miller's best writing in decades.

NY Newsday

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.

NY Post

NY Times

MOUNT MORGAN has an elegiac dignity...

Publishers Weekly

To double his pleasure, Lyman Felt has procured two wives, but when they find out about each other, he incurs double the wrath. Miller's play about the feelings of a lying man delve into the harder questions about human relationships, pitching love and truth to one's self at the expense of love and truth to another. As Felt comes to terms with the two families he has ruined, he must find redemption while being true to his larger-than-life self-perception. L.A. Theatre Works performs this amusing and even endearing play in front of a live audience with acclaimed actor Brian Cox lambasting his way through scenes as Felt repudiating and embracing his two angered lovers. Cox's voice, like Felt's personality, dominates nearly every scene, which benefits the production since he is the epicenter of humor, thought and enlightenment. The acoustics of the performance hall provides crisp and resonating voices of the cast while moderately capturing the audience. The ambience of it all harkens to the old days of radio shows like Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air, but with sound quality far superior than any antenna could provide. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In reading Miller's most recent work, one cannot escape the echoes of the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman (1949). Both plays present time and space as free-flowing entities, leading the audience/reader through the action with the disjointed logic of memories and hallucinations spliced onto reality. Similarly, at the heart of each play is a man in midlife crisis, a man who has betrayed women, a man whose children are devastated by the revelation of their father's true character. While Willy Loman was a failure, however, Lyman Felt is a successful businessman. And so, while Willy was haunted by Ben and lost opportunity, Lyman is stalked by the specter of death and guilt in the form of his father. Ironically, Miller's latest hero is in trouble because he is too opportunistic. His crime is that he refuses to say ``no'' to himself, regardless of whom he destroys along the way. That, according to Miller, appears to be the tragedy of the 1990s. Or was that the 1980s? For most drama collections.-- Dianne Greene Mahony, Harvey Sch., Katonah, N.Y.