SANTA BARBARA THEATRE OF THE AIR Posts

Laura Cahill wrote the play Hysterical Blindness and adapted it into the film of the same name (HBO), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay, a Writers Guild Award, and a Primetime Emmy in Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries/Movie/Dramatic Special.

She wrote the pilot and six episodes of the TV series Pornopolis for IFC, and has written pilots for HBO, Touchstone, Paramount, and WB.

She adapted the screenplays for What Matters Most, The Down Low, and B Mother (all for Lifetime), and wrote the original screenplays Witness Protection (CBS) and Boston Strangler (USA). Her plays include Sondra, MercyJersey Girls Go to the Park, The Way, Stalker and our current offering.

Home, by Laura Cahill (Playing time:  24:13)
Starring Bonnie Bartlett and Nancy Kawalek.

(Thomas Wolfe told us You Can’t Go Home Again. A divorced daughter has to try.)

Santa Barbara Theatre of the Air

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and figure in twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947): Death of a Salesman (1949) (directed by Elia Kazan and receiving a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York Drama Circle Critics’ Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He also wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century.

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1952, Elia Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Kazan named eight members of the Group Theatre, including Clifford Odets, Paula Strasberg, Lillian Hellman, J. Edward Bromberg, and John Garfield, who in recent years had been fellow members of the Communist Party.  Miller and Kazan were close friends throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Kazan’s testimony to the HUAC, the pair’s friendship ended.

During this time, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was married to Marilyn Monroe.

In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts and in 1998 was honored with the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist.  In 1999, Miller was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” In 2001 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) selected Miller for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

In 2001, Miller received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the following year was awarded Spain’s Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature as “the undisputed master of modern drama”.

At the time of his death, Miller was considered to be one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century.

I Can’t Remember Anything, by Arthur Miller (Playing time: 33:53)
Starring Mitchell Ryan and Salome Jens.

(A widow visits her deceased husband’s best friend daily. There are consequences.)

Santa Barbara Theatre of the Air