No Villain

No Villain

Staged Reading at the Public Theatre

New York, NY

2 May 2016

Directed by Wendy Goldberg

During this Miller centennial year, audiences throughout the world have reveled in the staggering number of revivals of not only Miller's major plays, but also his less frequently produced dramas. Theatergoers in the New York metropolitan area have experienced Ivo van Hove's remaking of A View from the Bridge and The Crucible, a Yiddish production of Death of a Salesman, and powerful versions of Incident at Vichy and Broken Glass. The significance of Miller's hundredth birthday also stirred interest in plays that had never appeared on any world stage. Audiences in England had the advantage of seeing world premieres of a staged version of The Hook (the screenplay that Miller wrote about the Sicilian-American dockworkers in Brooklyn that he and Elia Kazan peddled in Hollywood in 1951), and the very first play that Miller wrote, No Villain.

No Villain holds an important place in Miller's canon as the first of the three plays he wrote at the University of Michigan. During spring break 1935, Miller decided to try his hand at playwriting in order to win the annual Avery Hopwood Award that came with a cash prize, money that Miller desperately needed. Miller's natural bent for drama was born: the clearly autobiographical play won joint-first prize (snagging him $250) when Miller submitted it for the 1936 contest in his sophomore year. The next year, Honors at Dawn won him his second Hopwood Award, this time, outright; a third play, The Great...