MR Peter's Connection

by Arthur Miller

This is Arthur Miller's play in which the eponymous central character inhabits a world of dreams where he encounters a number of characters including Adele, a bag lady, who represents an incomprehensible sinister presence on the margins of a big city's existence.

Genres: Plays, Fiction, Theatre

Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Works of American playwright Arthur Asher Miller include Death of a Salesman (1949), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Crucible (1953).


This essayist, a prominent figure in literature and cinema for over 61 years, composed a wide variety, such as celebrated A View from the Bridge and All My Sons , still studied and performed worldwide. Miller often in the public eye most famously refused to give evidence to the un-American activities committee of the House of Representatives, received award for drama, and married Marilyn Monroe. People at the time considered the greatest Miller.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_...

Reviews

[J. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe I need to read some literary criticism to know exactly what went on in this play....otherwise...it was simply awful...

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of Miller's last plays, Mr. Peters' Connections doesn't have a particularly robust reputation, and while I think critics have tended to wrongly reject the playwright's later works out of hand from what I've read (for instance I think Resurrection Blues is a very good play), I think the general assessment of this longish one-scene fantasy as middling is pretty much on point. While Miller's gifts for capturing individual voice and the rhythms of speech with his dialogue are more than apparent throughout, and I think the work's ultimate plea for understanding and love between and among people as well as its depiction of the confusion and fear and loneliness of aging and dying are admirable, its fantastical elements and its confused, quasi-amnesiac characters-as-imagined phantoms feel creaky and outmoded for something originating from as late a date as 1999; it reads to me like Miller trying his hand at Beckett, and if anyone is going to do that besides Beckett himself it should probably be Harold Pinter, not Arthur Miller. I did enjoy just having Miller's dialogue wash over me as I read (and it is a quick read), but having just read Incident at Vichy a week or two ago, not to mention previously having read and seen stagings of towering masterpieces like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge, etc., I can't rightly say this measures up well to what he could do at or near his best.

[Tamra · Rating 1 out of 5]

I fell in love with Arthur Miller while reading The Crucible and we had a steamy affair that lasted through several of his plays. Unfortunately, this is the play where I had to break it off.

I didn't get it. I even read it twice through to try to get it and decided that even if I DID end up getting it, I wouldn't have appreciated it anyways.

And this is all very sad because I went to go see Mr. Miller in person in San Jose, CA. I skipped school with my mom and 2 friends to go get a hardback Death of a Salesman and have him sign it. So I have a signed copy, and that's dang cool. I also bought his latest play, Mr. Peters' Connections and sadly, it isn't up to par.

I haven't read an Arthur Miller play since.

[Özgür Daş · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mr. Peters'ın metruk bir gece kulübünde geçen ömrünün son anları... Sıradan şeylerin önemli şeyleri gölgelediği, açgözlülüğün ve hırsın insanın doğasında olduğunu vurgulayan tek perdelik bir varoluş değinisi ve modern dünya eleştirisi.

[Isaac Timm · Rating 2 out of 5]

What?

[Ludmilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

bir nevi hayat muhasebesi. miller'ın diğer oyunları kadar güçlü değil belki ama yine de okunmayı hak ediyor.

[y · Rating 2 out of 5]

This felt like Miller read a page of Kierkegaard and Socrates and maybe a bit of Freud - and THEN he decided to smash out 40 pages before calling it a day.
Note to myself: still a good try at trying to round up his work and themes - but you’d need to read all his famous works to subsist a pattern...

[Ena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heart warming/wrenching ending. But the characters are not strong enough for a higher rating, and a couple of questionable decisions with the females. They feel a bit one dimensional, and I don’t think nudity is called for in this play.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idk….there’s a lot of negative reviews, but this felt like a more robust and better version of a Mitch albom book—accomplishing more in less.

[Jacob Wilkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

How like sex the trumpet is--it always leaves you kind of sad when it's finished.
-- Arthur Miller, Mr Peter's Connections

The same simile can be applied to this story--fun, intriguing, and a joy (truly) to read. Miller just has such a mastery with his diction that you can't not enjoy any of his work. Sadly, it doesn't make a damn lick of sense. I'm sure there's an explanation--Miller is too great a writer for there not to be--but I certainly don't know it. If Finnegan's Wake was a play, I think it would read much like this. It's fun to laugh with, to enjoy--but you're going to leave confused. At first, I thought I understood what Miller was going for, but eventually I lost that certainty. The ending is..odd.

I think Ben Brantley, the current chief theater critic for The New York Times, put it best. He wrote, "The work is an example of the experimental, ruminative style the dramatist has adopted of late, an approach that is by no means his most effective . . . his recent exercises in abstraction have an oddly old-fashioned feeling . . . though Connections may portray a world of baffling ambiguity, the ways in which it does so tend to be blunt and even clumsy."

This isn't Miller's best, but it's a quick read and it's a decent time. Who knows, maybe you'll make sense of it.

[Lily Ocansey]

so many things

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just did not get it. I loved it, in the sense that Arthur Miller is a genius with words, but I could not tell you what happened. Unfortunately, this play just does not make any sense.