The Ride Down Mt. Morgan by Arthur Miller

First published: 1991

First produced: 1991, at Wyndham’s Theatre, London

Type of plot: Tragicomedy

Time of work: c. 1990

Locale: Elmira, New York

Principal Characters:

• Lyman Felt, an insurance executive
• Theodora “Theo” Felt, his wife
• Bessie, their daughter
• Tom Wilson, their lawyer
• Father, Lyman’s father
• Leah Felt, Lyman’s second wife

The Play

As The Ride Down Mt. Morgan opens, Lyman Felt is lying half-conscious in a hospital bed with a leg and an arm in casts. The night before the action begins, Lyman crashed his Porsche while driving down a treacherous stretch of Mount Morgan in the middle of an ice storm in upstate New York. While he has been unconscious, the hospital contacted his family in Manhattan and, as he awakens from what seems to be a dream about his father, he learns that his wife and daughter have just arrived. This does not make him happy; in fact, it seems to terrify him. He cries, “It can’t happen, it mustn’t happen!” He then slips out of the rear of the leg cast and moves across the stage, still in his hospital gown, while the empty cast remains in the bed. As he watches, the setting changes to the hospital waiting room, and he imagines a scene in which his wife, Theo, and his daughter Bessie meet Leah, his second wife, and all of them learn his secret: For the past nine years Lyman has been a bigamist, lying to and betraying everyone who loves him.

Throughout the rest of the play, Lyman moves in and out of the bed, back and forth between past and present, observing and imagining scene after scene—participating in some conversations, overhearing others—as events of his life are reenacted on the stage. Although the play consciously blurs the lines between reality and dream, fact and fantasy, tragedy and farce, the outlines of his story gradually emerge. Lyman is a rich, well-known insurance executive who heads a company that employs forty-two hundred people and is noted for its social responsibility. He is also a compulsive philanderer who may have betrayed his former business partner to the authorities in order to save his own neck. Nine years ago, at the age of fifty-four, he met a much younger woman, Leah, on a business trip to Elmira and they began an affair that led to her becoming pregnant. When she told him she was going to have an abortion, he promised to divorce his wife and marry her. Summarized this way, his story seems a cliché, the tale of a midlife crisis and a mistress. However, the play does not present this information chronologically, and long before these facts are revealed, the audience knows that Lyman’s story does not end like most similar stories. Forced to choose between his wife and his mistress, he chose both. After promising Leah that he would leave his wife, he took Leah to Reno, where she thought he got his divorce, and they were married.

In fact, his divorce was a charade and, unbeknownst to either woman, he began to lead a double life, spending two weeks of each month with Theo in Manhattan and two weeks with Leah and their son Benjamin in Elmira. In the townhouse on East Seventy-fourth Street in Manhattan, he was a solid citizen, a doting father, and a newly attentive husband to Theo, who, like Lyman, is in her early sixties. In Elmira, he began a new life with Leah, who is in her thirties: They buy a ranch-style house, raise their own food, have sixty head of cattle, and begin to raise thoroughbred horses. Although he has always been afraid of flying, in Elmira he begins to pilot a private plane, to hunt, and to race sports cars.

Thus, the accident exposes him and raises the questions that the play explores: How could a man do this? How would he justify himself if his deception were exposed? How would the women react? Would either of them remain with him?

Dramatic Devices

Because Miller is usually considered a realist concerned, above all, with moral, social, and political issues, his mastery of dramatic form is sometimes forgotten or underestimated. He once told an interviewer that he comes out of the tradition of the Greeks and playwright Henrik Ibsen, “where the past is the burden of man and it’s got to be placed on the stage so that he can grapple with it. That’s the way those plays are built. It’s now grappling with then, it’s the story of how the birds come home to roost. Every play.” Certainly this is also the story of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.

Still, if the essential subjects and concerns of Miller’s plays have not changed much over the years, his dramatic techniques certainly have. Many of his plays—such as All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, Incident at Vichy, The Price, The Last Yankee (pb. 1991, pr. 1993), and Broken Glass (pr., pb. 1994)—are straightforward dramas in the realist tradition. However, throughout his career, Miller also has drawn on other traditions. Death of a Salesman, for example, was originally titled The Inside of His Head. This earlier title was “conceived half in laughter,” Miller has explained, since “the inside of his head was a mass of contradictions.” He went on to say, however, that the point he was making with this early title was expressed in the final play, explaining that the image in Death of a Salesman was imbued with the concept that nothing in life comes “next” but instead everything exists together and simultaneously within us. The means Miller chose to express this idea in Death of a Salesman—the flowing movement of the action from present to past, from “actual” to “remembered” events, from the exterior to the interior of lead character Willy Loman—are indebted not to Ibsen but to August Strindberg’s dream plays and expressionism. The effect of After the Fall is crucially dependent on a similar movement in time, space, and the consciousness of Quentin. Miller again uses this technique in his play Mr. Peter’s Connections (pr. 1998, pb. 1999).

The Ride Down Mt. Morgan also could have been called “The Inside of His Head,” since, from the moment Lyman first walks out of his cast and imagines the scene in the waiting room, the audience is drawn into a theatrical space where the normal rules of realism, time, and setting are suspended. Not only does Lyman rise from his bed and return at will—sometimes suggesting that the scene is imaginary, sometimes that he is simply observing the action—but he occasionally takes on the role of director. For example, when he raises his hands and tells his wives and daughter “to lie down!” the three women “instantly de-animate.” Then, “Lyman gestures, without actually touching them, and causes Leah and Theo to lie on the bed” next to one another. At other times the action seems outside his control.

Several times, scenes are run twice with slight variations. Later in the play, as he lies in bed, Leah and Theo appear “on either side of him, but on elevated platforms, like two stone deities,” and they proceed to talk about their skills as cooks. Lyman’s father appears and reappears—criticizing, challenging, threatening—dragging an ominous black cloth with which he eventually shrouds Lyman. Acting as a cross between the ghost of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Willy Loman’s brother Ben, he seems a projection of Lyman’s deepest fears and insecurities. Because of the way the play causes its audience to doubt the reality of what they are seeing and hearing, the ending of the play, which suggests that either or both of the women may yet take Lyman back, gains an added level of ambiguity.

Critical Context

Arthur Miller’s work spans nearly seven decades. While other playwrights have written as much, virtually no American playwright has enjoyed the longevity of such a career and few have had anything like Miller’s international recognition. Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are now generally regarded as masterpieces of twentieth century American drama and literature; a half dozen more of his plays have grown in memory, outlasting initially critical reviews, and are performed regularly nationally and internationally. In the 1990’s, he continued to write new one-act and full-length plays and continued to experiment with form and tone. Like a number of his plays from the late twentieth century, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is clear evidence that Miller’s imagination and invention have remained every bit as vital as his moral vision.

Sources for Further Study

Centola, Steve, ed. The Achievement of Arthur Miller: New Essays. Dallas, Tex.: Contemporary Research Press, 1995.

Corrigan, Robert W., ed. Arthur Miller: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Miller, Arthur. The Portable Arthur Miller. Rev. ed. Edited by C. W. E. Bigsby. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Miller, Arthur. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. New York: Viking, 1978.

Roudane, Matthew Charles, ed. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987.