Arthur Miller, who died in 2005 at the age of 89, was one of the great moral arbiters of his era through such classics as “Death of A Salesman,” “The Crucible,” and “All My Sons.” That distinction will be made clear on January 25 when a top-shelf cast of writers and celebrities gather to honor the legendary playwright in “Arthur Miller: One Night 100 Years” at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway. While the official date of his birth centenary was last October 17 — marked by the New York revivals of “Incident at Vichy,” “A View from the Bridge,” and the forthcoming “The Crucible” — the celebration continues with this gala, directed by Gregory Mosher and featuring, among others, Alec Baldwin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bradley Cooper, Ellen Barkin, Greta Gerwig, Brian Dennehy, Laurence Fishburne, and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. Given the line-up and the wealth of the material, you can be sure that “Attention must be paid” — the most famous line from “Death of a Salesman” — will be heard in the course of the evening.“There has been such an outpouring of good will on the part of these extraordinary actors and writers,” said Rebecca Miller, the playwright’s daughter. Herself a writer and filmmaker who is married to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, she also noted the response from her peers: Tony Kushner, Ayad Akhtar, A.R. Gurney, and Katori Hall, who will be reading from the papers and writings of her father at the benefit. The actors will be re-creating scenes from his most famous works, with Fishburne and Richardson playing Willy and Linda Loman from “Salesman,” Cooper taking on an excerpt from “After the Fall,” and Baldwin, Barkin, and Gyllenhaal playing the Keller family at the center of the corrosive drama, “All My Sons.”“It’s a chance for these actors to play around with this material, to take on roles that they normally wouldn’t be cast in,” said Miller. “It’s going to be a really cool night.”Asked her opinion of the acclaimed revivals of “Incident at Vichy” and “A View from the Bridge,” directed by Michael Wilson and Ivo van Hove, respectively, Miller said that she was struck by how relevant and contemporary they seemed. “They both unsheathed the elemental power of the plays, they were so pure and masterful,” she noted. “There is no ‘definitive’ production of a play because it can be interpreted in an infinite variety of ways.”As one of the custodians of her father’s work, Miller focuses on what is produced in New York. She admitted that her initial response to any overture is “to say ‘No’ unless there is a really good reason to say ‘Yes.’” What caught Miller’s attention with “Incident at Vichy” was how well it mirrored the “age of vulgarity” in which we are living. What struck her about “A View from the Bridge” was the dilemma of the Italian immigrants in the drama. “I kept thinking of the Syrian refugees,” she said. “My father’s legacy is the belief that people don’t exist in the world alone. We are responsible for each other.”It’s for this reason that Miller and her three siblings decided to form and fund The Arthur Miller Foundation, which will be the beneficiary of the evening’s proceeds. Its mandate is to bring arts to public schools. “We firmly believe that arts education is a right and not a privilege and should be as much a part of the school day as English and math,” said Miller. “Pulling this [evening] together has been daunting but everybody has been so generous because they believe in that cause. And it’s something that I believe my father would have been very proud of.”
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