Content area
Full text
Abstract
Mr. Peters' Connections (1998) is often viewed as Arthur Miller's most experimental late play. Yet, despite its uniqueness and evident dramatic value, scholarly commentary usually focuses on its likeness with Pinter and Beckett plays and sometimes on how it is an apt product of an "octogenarian" mind. Although the play is also an apropos depiction of the dilemma of aging in ageist America, no scholarly work has analyzed it through the lens of critical gerontology or age studies. Drawing on gerontological studies and research, the essay sheds light on the meaninglessness and disillusionment suffered by elderly adults every day of their lives-the struggles whose apt embodiment we find in Mr. Harry Peters, the central character of Miller's play. (AS)
KEYWORDS: Arthur Miller, Mr. Peters' Connections, ageist society; aging and ageism in America; critical gerontology, age studies
Arthur Miller's late play Mr. Peters' Connections (1998) is a moving portrayal of what it is like to grow old in modern times and experience a loss of vital connections. It also offers a significant commentary on how the disconnectedness experienced by older adults is a direct consequence of a predominantly ageist atmosphere. On the face of it, however, the play is a massive muddle of mundane conversation with many voices focused on individual agendas, stuck amongst whom is Mr. Harry Peters, the play's central character, making desperate attempts to catch hold of the "subject." Peters embodies the constant "otherness" older adults must face in a world where aging is viewed more as a kind of "virus," a terminal disease rather than as a natural course of human existence.
From the moment Peters appears onstage, there is a feeling of the show already being over. Caught somewhere between "life and death" (Abbotson 249), between "waking and sleeping" (Miller and Gussow 185), he happens to wander into an "old abandoned nightclub in New York City" where around a "dusty upright piano" some furniture lies "upended' (Miller, Collected Plays1 401). He came to this neighborhood to buy himself a pair of extra narrow shoes that he finds only at a local store owned by Larry and then happened to venture into the surreal space of the nightclub to wait for his wife, Charlotte, whose name he keeps blocking out...