After the Fall, one of Miller's more personal plays, is a thinly veiled personal critique centered on Miller's recent divorce from Marilyn Monroe: the plot takes place inside the mind of Quentin, a New York City Jewish intellectual who decides to reexamine his life, in order to determine whether or not he should marry his most recent love, Holga.
The play has been roundly criticised by some for being too similar to Miller's actual life because Maggie's suicide is similar to the accidental overdose death of Miller's former wife, Monroe. The feelings of the protagonist, Quentin, are often believed to be Miller's own reflections about his failed marriage.[citation needed]
For example, according to Sarah Bradford, in her biography America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, “Jackie, who had admired Arthur Miller enough to seat him at her table at the Malraux dinner, turned on him for his betrayal of Marilyn in his play After the Fall, which opened in New York on January 23, 1964. For [Jackie Kennedy] loyalty was the ultimate test of character, and in portraying Marilyn as a self-destructive slut whom he had abandoned for her own good, Miller had dismally failed it.”
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The play remains one of Miller's less popular works, attributed in part to the non-linear, often surrealistic nature of the plot and setting; all but the initial and final seconds of the play take place in the protagonist's brain, which is reflected by a set comprising a single chair before a concentration campguard tower, which is surrounded by a giant, winding ramp made up of crevices, pits, and abutments. The plot unfolds over a period of time, and due to the non-linear nature of the story, characters and occurrences appear as the protagonist remembers them. Reflecting the nature of the mind, they often disappear and their stories remain unresolved until later in the play, when they spontaneously reappear again.
Frank Rich noted: "Quentin is a witness to alarming public and personal catastrophes: the stock market crash, the Holocaust, the McCarthy witchhunts and the self-destruction of a show business idol to whom he is married."[3]
^Bradford, Sarah (2001). "Arthur Miller". America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Penguin. p. 225. ISBN1101564016.
^Abbotson, Susan C. W.. (2007). "After the Fall". Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Infobase Publishing. p. 38. ISBN978-1438108384.