Performance: Broken Glass (1996)
Season 6, Episode 4
No writer shows self hatred like Miller
12 November 2003
Miller always finds something to self hate in every leading character in all his plays. Self hatred that brings each one inevitable bitter conflict and doom. From Death of a Salesman to All My Sons to A View From The Bridge to The Misfits to Broken Glass. All plow deeply within the lead male psyche, and those of his family, showing job/marital failure, sexual inadequacies and perversions, terrible parenting, incestuous desire/shame, substance abuse, and myriad other reasons to cause them to wonder why they were ever born. Gets a bit tiresome at times as it is really a one note song that never, ever lets up. A case could be made that all of his plays are merely successive acts in one play.

But, as he is so in tune with his human nature, and that of all humans, he writes all of these plays so well that we are always drawn into the human maelstrom we know he will create, and as a result, feel as emotionally exhausted at the end of each final scene as he surely did upon the final day of writing each one.

Broken Glass is no different, and no less exhausting. And no less terrific.
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