Incident at Vichy: A Play

Excellent play by Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller. When I think of him, I think of Marilyn Monroe, Streetcar Named Desire, Our Town... But he was Jewish, and as with many Jewish artistic elites, he was painfully aware of what was happening, what had happened in Europe under the Third Reich. He also knew that the crimes extended beyond the boundaries of Germany. There is something chilling in the stark simplicity of this play that needs a revival - to remind us that no country is so educated or sophisticated that it is beyond complicity with Evil and Hate.

This is the first of Miller I have read. It's remarkable how Miller can develop such rich characters and such a moving drama in so few pages. I don't know. Maybe it's not. Length and emotional gravity may be independent of one another. Anyway, I enjoyed reading it. It's both a reminder of man's potential for cruelty, and an appeal to his potential for compassion. Beautiful.

Incident at Vichy, first published in 1964, is one of Miller's lesser known works, but I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I conclude once again, as I did earlier this year after reading Death of a Salesman.... Miller is a genius!The Crucible is another gem that everyone should read! Really, he is fantastically good.Incident at Vichy takes place in 1942, in Nazi-occupied France [Vichy].The setting is very simple. A detention room, where eight men and a young boy are being held. One by one, they are interrogated in an adjoining room and none of them are sure of the reason for their arrest.In the tense interim, as would be expected, they talk with one another.Some of these men are Jews, and some are not.Soon, the consensus is that Jewishness is indeed the "crime" for which they've been rounded up, and rumors and speculations are exchanged.Those who feel that their interrogation may end with a "pass" allowing them to leave, become optimistic. Those who know that they themselves are Jewish, panic. And the tension in the room mounts.Should they try to escape? Should they behave themselves and hope for release? Surely, surely their worst fears cannot be true?Soon there are only two men left in the room, awaiting judgment.And Miller ends this 70-page nerve-rattler with a wonderful twist.I'll only say that it is amazing how little paper Miller needs to show us the worst and the best of what it means to be a human being.Apparently, the story itself came from a tale that Miller had heard about a Holocaust survivor, told to Miller by his psychiatrist. It was about a Jew who was rescued from the Nazis by a total stranger.Miller speaks of directing a production of Incident at Vichy some 20 years after the end of the war and, to his astonishment, having to explain to the young actors what the SS was!The only other play that had dealt with the topic in the twenty years since the end of the war was The Diary of Anne Frank. Miller said, "There is something wrong when an audience can see a play about the Nazi treatment of a group of Jews hiding in an attic and come away feeling . . . gratification."From the time that he was very young, Miller was aware of being "different" (Jewish) and felt a sort of warning atmosphere from adults. Whatever it was that gave him this feeling of foreboding, he was aware of it hanging over him. He writes at length of his mother's "mysticism" and her fervor extending even to the point of feeling that the dead communicated with her. And in fact, she may have been right.While they were vacationing, and she was in a deep sleep, she suddenly sat up and said, "My mother died."She was right. Her mother had died during that exact hour.Miller said that his experiences with this sensing of lurking danger was something he had learned, but he had not been taught "how to defend against it. The dilemma would last a long time. The ... effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization, underlie the political aspect of my play, Incident at Vichy."The play, then, attempts to answer the question of how to defend against danger, or evil. A topic that seems to enthrall many people [including myself].Most critics panned it as being too lecture-riddled. Too didactic. Vichy was banned in the Soviet Union.All I can say is that I am glad it is available to us today.Listen, I encourage you to spend some time with Incident at Vichy.You can read it inside an hour or so.It is truly unforgettable.

In this stunning play, set in a holding room in Vichy, France, in 1942, Arthur Miller introduces nine men who have been picked up on suspicion that they are Jews or Jewish sympathizers. As they are called, one by one, to be interrogated by Nazi officials before being released or put on the thirty-car freight train waiting at the station, they reveal their thinking, their rationalizations for having been picked up, and their belief that this is all a big mistake. A German major involved in the interrogations is also beginning to question his own role, reminding his colleague, a professor in charge of carrying out Nazi racial policies, that he is a "line officer," not trained for his role.Waiting to be questioned are an actor, a waiter, a businessman, a psychoanalyst, a Marxist railroad worker, a gypsy, an ancient Hasid, a fourteen-year-old boy, and an Austrian prince. As they talk and begin to share bits of information, Miller examines the tendency of ordinary men, who are often victims, to become immobilized when faced with "an atrocity...that is inconceivable," to refuse to believe that such behavior can possibly happen in a civilized world. At the same time, he also examines those others, the Nazis and their collaborators in France, who serve an ideology, not mankind, those who subordinate themselves so completely to an abstract concept that they believe "there are no persons anymore."As the truth about the waiting train and its destination slowly emerges, the sense of dread becomes palpable. The psychoanalyst, trying to rouse people to overpower the single guard on duty, cannot make his fellow captives understand that it is their belief that the world is essentially rational that keeps them from acting, and that the Nazis count on this belief. Pivotal to the action is von Berg, the young Austrian prince, a Christian who left his property and thousand-year-old heritage to escape to France, a man whose heart is in the right place but who does not understand that he himself must accept complicity in the rise of the Nazis.Beautifully paced, the play is an unusually sophisticated treatment of this subject. Miller does not see events purely in black and white, showing instead that everyone creates his own reality to keep from accepting the unthinkable. Written in 1964, while Miller was representing the New York Herald Tribune at the Frankfurt war crimes trials of officials from Auschwitz/Birkenau, this play is Miller's creative reaction to the atrocities he has heard first-hand--and one of his most powerful plays. Mary WhippleFor videos or DVDs of live performances of Arthur Miller plays: Incident at Vichy (Broadway Theatre Archive) Death of a Salesman (Broadway Theatre Archive) Broadway Theatre Archive Arthur Miller Collection (Death of a Salesman/Incident at Vichy/Enemy of the People/Memory of Two Mondays) - Amazon.com Exclusive