Customer Reviews

The Last Yankee (Plays, Penguin)

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While this is a very slight work by Miller, it has two themes that polarize our society. Money is the theme that draws two women away from their husbands and into a mental health facility. One of the women feels that her husband does not provide enough. The other woman recieves everything but her husband's time. The other factor is the idea of victimization. The feeling that a certain people are frowned upon because they are considered foreigners in America. In this work, the comparison is between a Swedish and Yankee family.

While Miller leads the reader to believe that one of the women is a great deal sicker than the other, Miller includes a moral in the play. The woman that wanted more realizes all that she has and feels better. This woman leaves the health facility. The other woman who we are led to believe is the least ill despite having everything she could want finds she can not have what she really wants. Her husband has no time for her. She stays at the health facility depsite our earlier impression that she would be the one leaving.

This work is far from special and lacks much of the depth of Miller's other works. That being said, fans of Miller will probably still enjoy it.

It is never revealed but this play is written about a real person whom Miller had intimate knowledge of. Although disguised somewhat, it is a second hand description of my mothers psychiatric hospitalization in 1968. Much of the the dialogue were exact quotes from my father(Hamilton in the story).
It documents an outsiders view of a deeply traumatic, turbulent time in my family, that only skims the surface of one of the characters(Hamilton). It was so much more than that.