In Connecticut, you can visit the writing room where Mark Twain wrote “Huckleberry Finn,” the summer cottage that Eugene O’Neill used as the setting for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the home where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “The American Woman’s Home” and two different schoolhouses where Nathan Hale taught. The town of Roxbury wants to add Arthur Miller’s writing studio to that list.
Supporters of the playwright’s legacy are raising funds and awareness to make that happen.
Two weeks ago a GoFundMe campaign was launched looking to raise $1 million to move the studio next to Roxbury’s public library, then renovate and maintain it.
The GoFundMe campaign is just the latest phase in an effort that began 15 years ago. When the eminent playwright and longtime Connecticut resident Arthur Miller died in 2005, his daughter, filmmaker Rebecca Miller, decided that his home in Roxbury would be sold but that his small work studio — a standalone 14-foot by 22-foot building — would be relocated and preserved.
“It all starts with the sale of the Arthur Miller house,” said Marc Olivieri. He was Miller’s neighbor for 25 years. The men shared a passion for woodworking. Olivieri’s been involved in every phase of the studio’s afterlife and is a member of the Arthur Miller Writing Studio Project, which formed around the need to preserve the space.
“Rebecca Miller sells the house,” Olivieri continued, “and expresses urgency that we get the studio off the property. We move the building under some duress because of the sale date. We found a temporary ‘parking place’ where the town let us store it. It’s been there a while. We developed an Arthur Miller Studio committee and made arrangements with various other Arthur Miller organizations. Everyone wants to help.”
The committee created “a very considered, very thought-out plan to bring the building to a site at Roxbury’s Minor Memorial Library,” Olivieri said. “We have a good plan. There were delays and a long interruption due to COVID. We became a 501c3 non-profit. That was a lot of work.”
The town of Roxbury is keen to accept the studio as a gift, Olivieri explained, but as is common with donations of buildings in need of regular maintenance, didn’t want the cost of the upkeep to be shouldered by taxpayers. “For the town to accept the gift, they want us to show we’re responsible for it.”
Meanwhile, the studio needs to be moved from its current location because that lot is slated to be resurfaced by the town. “They need to have us get it out of their way,” Olivieri said. It may just be a simple matter of moving it to an adjacent lot, but the action is reinvigorating the entire preservation project.
On the plus side, “It’s a small building,” Olivieri said. “It’s easy to renovate.”
When the studio is finally installed next to the library — which has its own specific zoning requirements that need to be dealt with — the hope is to make it the center of a range of activities that honor Miller’s work.
“Our mission is to offer programming and coordinate with other [Miller-themed] entities,” Olivieri said. “We have the blessing of his alma mater, the University of Michigan, as well the University of Texas at Austin, which has his archives. What we’re doing is preserving his voice.”
Miller is considered one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. His best-known works are the modern tragedy “Death of a Salesman,” the historical drama “The Crucible” (which uses the Salem witch trials as a an allegory for the Red Scare and Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s) and the dockworker saga “A View From the Bridge.” Miller also wrote movies such as “The Misfits,” starring Clark Gable and Miller’s then-wife Marilyn Monroe.
“The Misfits” is one of the projects he wrote in Roxbury, where he lived from 1958 until his death 20 years ago. Among the other projects he worked on in the historic studio include a dozen plays (among them “After the Fall,” “Incident at Vichy” and “The American Clock”), half a dozen one-act plays, four screenplays (including for the 1996 movie of “The Crucible” starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Wynona Rider), his autobiography, several books of short stories and numerous essays and magazine articles.
In Connecticut, Miller had a special connection to the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, which chose “The Crucible” as the first play it produced when the theater was founded in 1965. The theater later did several more of his plays including “All My Sons,” “The Price” and, in 1994, the world premiere of “Broken Glass.”
Hartford Stage has announced it will do “All My Sons” in April 2024. That theater did “The Crucible” in 2011, a co-production with the Long Wharf.
Julia Bolus, who was Miller’s assistant for the last 10 years and worked in the studio alongside him, said some writings he did in the studio have yet to be released including a collection of excerpts from his journals.
Bolus, who is on the boards of both the Arthur Miller Society and the Arthur Miller Writing Studio Project, wants the studio to be “an inspirational space and part of Arthur’s legacy” as well as the impetus for new programs and events.
She said Miller had a study in his house where he “would look over projects, sign contracts, things like that,” but that the outside studio was special, “the one place where he could be by himself.” A short piece about the studio building that Bolus wrote in 2018 notes that it “was a place of solitude and true quiet. He would walk up the grassy slope from the house after breakfast and work all morning. … In the 1950s and ’60s, he often wrote by hand in his notebooks and journals here. He also used a Royal typewriter for writing play drafts and scripts, later an electric typewriter, followed by an early personal computer and then a laptop.”
This small building that held big ideas, where Miller not only created new works but also had filing cabinets full of his writings dating back to childhood, will hopefully be placed where it can inspire others.
The building itself is fragile, Olivieri said. “You couldn’t bring a lot of tourists through it.” But he can envision a roped-off area around Miller’s desk, typewriters, daybed, woodstove and other furnishings that can be looked at from one end of the studio. Miller’s manuscripts and other papers are now held at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
“People ask me what Arthur would’ve thought of all this,” Olivieri said. “I think he’d get a kick out of it. His studio is an orphan building. It’s a humorous dilemma.”
Indeed, Miller concluded his autobiography “Timebends” with thoughts on his studio: “I have lived more than half my life in the Connecticut countryside, all the time expecting to get some play or book finished so I can spend more time in the city, where everything is happening. There is something about this 40-year temporary residence that strikes me funny now. If only we could stop murdering one another we could be a wonderfully humorous species.”
