Incident at Vichy: A Play (Plays, Penguin) [Paperback]

Arthur Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 1985 | Series: Plays, Penguin

In Vichy France in 1942, eight men and a boy are seized by the collaborationist authorities and made to wait in a building that may be a police station. Some of them are Jews. All of them have something to hide—if not from the Nazis, then from their fellow detainees and, inevitably, from themselves. For in this claustrophobic antechamber to the death camps, everyone is guilty. And perhaps none more so than those who can walk away alive.

In Incident at Vichy, Arthur Miller re-creates Dante's hell inside the gaping pit that is our history and populates it with sinners whose crimes are all the more fearful because they are so recognizable.

"One of the most important plays of our time . . . Incident at Vichy returns the theater to greatness." —The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1963), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and The American Clock. He has also written two novels, Focus (1945), and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977), three books of photographs by his wife, Inge Morath. More recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), and the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season, and Mr. Peter's Connections (1998). His latest book is On Politics and the Art of Acting. Miller was granted with the 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (April 2, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140481931
• ISBN-13: 978-0140481938
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #857,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. He was awarded the Avery Hopwood Award for Playwrighting at University of Michigan in 1936. He twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, received two Emmy awards and three Tony Awards for his plays, as well as a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He also won an Obie award, a BBC Best Play Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, a Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Algur Meadows Award. He received honorary degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University and was awarded the Prix Moliere of the French theatre, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Lifetime Achievement Award and the Pulitzer Prize, as well as numerous other awards. He was named the Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001. He was awarded the 2002 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters and the 2003 Jerusalem Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Holding Room, January 19, 2006

By 

R. Chaffey "beckahi" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Incident at Vichy: A Play (Plays, Penguin) (Paperback)

For many readers of Arthur Miller, "Incident at Vichy" may seem like a departure from his typical fare. Set in France during 1942, this one act play takes place in a detention room as nine men question their fate. These men and one fourteen-year-old boy were randomly pulled off the street; initially they believe that it is an identity check, to make sure there isn't anyone with false papers, but as they are assembled together, they soon realize there is something more sinister behind their detainment.

Thrown together are men from a variety of backgrounds - a painter, an electrician, a buisnessman, an actor, a doctor, a waiter, a Prince, a Gypsy and and old Jew. As they voice their questions and concerns, they soon come to realize that they are there on suspicion of being Jewish. One by one they are called into the interrogation room where they are either given a pass to freedom, or will be taken away to the terrible fates they are just now learning exist. None of these men wants to admit that they are or aren't Jewish which only adds to the tension as they argue and attempt to formulate a futile escape plan.

"Incident at Vichy" is a quick read filled with questions that are bigger than the play. Miller throws questions at the audience that do not necessarily have answers. The ending finds only two men left to be interviewed - the Austrian Prince who was disgusted when his countrymen embraced the Nazis, and the doctor who reveals that he is a Jew and in hiding. Their confrontation turns both of their worlds upside down and creates an ending with no resolution.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Every nation has someone they condemn for their race.", August 17, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Incident at Vichy: A Play (Plays, Penguin) (Paperback)

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 also begins 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 tries to make his fellow captives understand that it is their belief that the world is essentially rational that is their main problem, and his conversations with the prince, von Berg, are pivotal to the action. Von Berg, a Christian who left his property and thousand-year-old heritage to escape to France, does not understand that he himself is complicit in the rise of the Nazis for not taking action when he had the chance.

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 Whipple

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good play, June 28, 2010

By 

Israel Drazin (Boca Raton, Florida) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Incident at Vichy: A Play (Plays, Penguin) (Paperback)

This play by Arthur Miller, one of the foremost American playwrights, tells about men who were snatched off the streets and dragged to a room in Vichy, France, to be interrogated in 1942 to find out if they are Jewish.

Only three of the men turn out not to be Jewish, a pompous businessman, a thieving gypsy, and an Austrian prince who was picked up because he had an accent. The prince is very intelligent, strongly anti-Nazi, and wept when his Jewish servants were arrested by the Nazis.

There is also a fearful Marxist, a bearded, sick, elderly man who looks Jewish, an actor who had a chance to escape but wanted to stay to act, a waiter, an artist, a psychiatrist who comments on the lives of the others, and a fifteen year old boy.

There is a German major among the interrogators who is strongly opposed to what is happening, but who sees no way, at least until the end of the play, how he can oppose the majority.

The prisoners learn about the death trains and the murders in furnaces in the concentration camps. Some of them believe it, others say they do not. Yet it is clear that this is only wishful thinking.

Miller raises many issues such as the existence of harsh discriminatory practices in every culture that are bad even though not as bad as those of the Nazis. He ends his play by dramatically answering the question, is the prince somehow also to blame for the Nazi acts?