ABSTRACT
By the early 1970s the American theatre seemed in one of its periodic crises. The promise of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway had largely dissipated; its leading companies had closed, and the social and political pressures which had given it a special significance for best part of a decade had relaxed. The major figures of the American theatre, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee – people who had between them dominated 1940s, 1950s and 1960s – seemed to disappear from public view. Miller's The Price was reasonably well received in 1968, but appeared at the time to be a coda to his career. Despite the fact that he has since had his work successfully produced on Broadway – achievement in regional theatre becoming, in the 1970s and 1980s, a primary route on to the Great White Way–he remains in many respects at odds with its values, as he does with those of a society which he regards as 'very, very nuts'.
