MILLER, Susan 1944-

PERSONAL: Born April 6, 1944, in Philadelphia, PA; daughter of Isaac Figlin (a musician and business executive) and Thelma Freifelder (a singer and artist); married Bruce Miller (an attorney), 1965 (divorced, 1976); children: Jeremy. Education: Pennsylvania State University, B.A., 1965; Bucknell University, M.A. 1970.

ADDRESSES: Home—847 North Kilkea Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90046. Agent—Joyce Ketay Agency, 1501 Broadway, Suite 1908, New York, NY, 10036. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Educator and playwright. Public school English teacher, Carlisle, PA, 1965-68; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, instructor in English, literature, and theatre arts, 1969-73, director in drama, 1969-73; Mark Taper Forum Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, playwright-in-residence, 1975; University of California, Los Angeles, lecturer in playwriting, 1975-76; Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, instructor, 1987-93; Rutgers University, lecturer, 1991; Westside YMCA, New York, NY, instructor, 1992-94; The Legacy Project, New York, NY, director, 1994-97. Supervising producer of Showtime television series Earthlings and The L Word, 2003—.

MEMBER: Dramatists Guild, PEN, Writers Guild of America.

AWARDS, HONORS: Rockefeller grant in playwriting, 1975; National Endowment for the Arts award, 1976, 1983; Obie Award, Village Voice, 1979, for Nasty Rumors and Final Remarks, and 1994, for My Left Breast; Susan Smith Blackburn prize, 1994, for My Left Breast, and 2002, for A Map of Doubt and Rescue; Robert Chesley Playwrighting Award, 1996, for lifetime achievement; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, 2003.

WRITINGS:

Writing: Process and Product, Winthrop Publishers (Cambridge, MA), 1976.

(With James M. McCrimmon and Webb Salmon) Writing with a Purpose, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1980.

Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1989.

Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1991.

(Compiler) The Written World: Reading and Writing in Social Context, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1989, republished as Written Worlds: Reading and Writing Culture, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1993.

(With Kyle Knowles) New Ways of Writing: A Handbook for Writing with Computers, Prentice Hall (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 1997.

Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1998.

(Contributor) Joan B. Ackerman, editor, Back Story, Dramatic Publishing (Chicago, IL), 2001.

PLAYS

No One Is Exactly 23 (produced in University Park, PA, at the Pennsylvania State University's Playhouse Theater, 1967; in Carlisle, PA, at Dickinson College, 1968), published in Pyramid (magazine), issue 1, 1968.

Cross Country (produced in Los Angeles, CA, at Mark Taper Forum, 1975; produced in New York, NY, at Interart Theatre, 1977), published in West Coast Plays, Volume 1, West Coast Plays (Berkeley, CA), 1977.

Confessions of a Female Disorder (produced at University of Washington, then in Los Angeles, CA, at Mark Taper Forum, 1973), published in Gay Plays: First Collection, edited by William H. Hoffman, Avon (New York, NY), 1979.

Nasty Rumors and Final Remarks (produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival, 1979), published in Amazon All Stars, Applause Books (New York, NY), 1997.

It's Our Town, Too (produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1992), published in Actor's Book of Gay and Lesbian Plays, Applause Books (New York, NY), 1992, and in The Best American Short Plays, 1992-1993, Applause Books (New York, NY), 1992.

My Left Breast (produced in Louisville, KY, at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, 1994; produced in New York, NY, 1995), published in The Best American Short Plays, 1994-1995, Applause Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Repairs (produced in New York, NY, 1998), published in Facing Forward, Broadway Play Publishing (New York, NY), 1995.

The Grand Design (produced in Miami, FL, at the City Theatre of Miami Short Play Festival), published in Take Ten II: More Ten-Minute Plays, Vintage (New York, NY), 2003.

Unpublished plays include Daddy/A Commotion of Zebras (produced in New York, NY at Alice Theatre, 1970); Silverstein & Co. (produced in New York, NY, 1972); Denim Lecture (produced in State College, PA, at the Pennsylvania State University, 1970; in Los Angeles, CA, at Mark Taper Forum, 1974); Flux (produced in New York, NY, by Phoenix Repertory Company, 1975; produced in London, England, by American Repertory Company, 1976); Arts and Leisure, (produced at the American Theatre Association Conference, 1982; produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1985); For Dear Life, (produced in New York, NY, at Public Theatre, 1989); and A Map of Doubt and Rescue, (produced in Poughkeepsie, NY, at the New York Stage and Film workshop at Vassar College).

Author of screenplays, including The Last Thing We Ever Do (for Disney) and Blessing in Disguise (for Warner Brothers). Coauthored screenplays One for the Money/Two for the Show and A Whale for the Killing. Author of scripts for television series, including Home Movie, Vision, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), L.A. Law, thirtysomething, The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, and Becoming the Smiths, Fox, 2000. Author of independent film Lady Beware.

SIDELIGHTS: For over thirty years, playwright Susan Miller has presented characters facing common, complicated, and atypical life issues. While not every theatergoer can personally relate to each character's issues, the universality of human struggle ties each play to each person who views it.

Confessions of a Female Disorder is the comic coming-of-age story of Ronnie, who begins as a young girl experiencing her first menstrual period. Ronnie's difficulties evolve, from finding the right man, maintaining marriage, and seeking sexual fulfillment, to the realization that she is a lesbian and all of the implications and struggles that follow. Miller presents Ronnie's life and those in it with a variety of acting techniques.

Raleigh, the heroine of Miller's Nasty Rumors and Final Remarks, is bedridden and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage when the play opens. As the action progresses, the audience sees her rise from her hospital bed and move through a number of scenes from her past, where she becomes engaged in exchanges with various friends, lovers, and family members on a journey of self-discovery. "This stylistic approach is filled with risk," noted Mel Gussow in his review of the play for the New York Times, "but as staged by A. J. Antoon, the play flows seamlessly through halls of reality and fantasy." This notion and technique of fluidity is often discussed in reviews of the play. A Contemporary Dramatists contributor stated that "Such presentational episodes connect so seamlessly in a montage of past events and present passions that we scarcely notice this technique until everyone gathers to bid good-bye to the dead woman."

The play's other characters include Fran, Raleigh's close friend; T. K., her son; Nick, her male lover; Max, her female lover; and her doctor. The dialogue is punctuated with "startling bursts of eloquence," observed Richard Christiansen in the Chicago Tribune. The playwright "also poses arresting questions about premature death, as in her observation that life passes before the eyes not of the dying but of those who continue to live." But Miller is ultimately "unable to make us feel as deeply for the heroine as she evidently does herself," Gussow remarked. Christiansen offered comments similar to Gussow's pronouncement: "Miller hasn't offered satisfactory reasons why . . . [Raleigh] should be such a compelling, consuming force in the lives of the people who love her." However, both Christiansen and Gussow found the play to be, as Christiansen wrote, "a difficult, demanding, sometimes startling drama." "Nasty Rumors and Final Remarks" has "a genuine theatricality," Gussow added, and "the playwright has sharp insights into ironic aspects of bereavement."

In My Left Breast, a one-woman play, Miller divulges her own thoughts on and battle with breast cancer—and the subsequent mastectomy—that changed her life forever. The play traces Miller's diagnosis at the age of thirty-six, the chemotherapy and mastectomy she endured, the long healing process that followed, and reflections on how the disease affected her relationships. The sole character in My Left Breast is the playwright herself, and Miller often takes the stage to play this role. "I felt a need to speak directly. To be with the audience," Miller told T. Massari McPherson in an interview for Anchorage Press Online. "I was excited by the notion of performing and . . . it has been a fantastic experience. The response is what keeps it going for me. The overwhelming response has been such a gift."

When asked how she turned such a devastating personal experience into a play that has repeatedly captivated a very diverse audience, Miller told Boston Phoenix Online's Tamara Weider, "I think the key, really, is the humanity and access to somebody's flaws and relationships, so that any member of the audience, whether it is a man or a woman or a young person, can access some part of it for him-or herself. People deal with shifts in their lives, and I think are very interested in how other people deal with them."

At the end of each performance, Miller always unbuttons her shirt and reveals her mastectomy scars to the audience. Discussing the play's conclusion, Miller told Weider, "I've always felt that if it didn't feel right, I wouldn't do it. I also don't surprise people with it; I don't think that's right. It's not about that. I'm not trying to shock anybody." Miller's character transcends the physical pain and loss associated with her cancer and finds a kind of beauty in the dark and tragic event. "I miss it," Miller says of her left breast. "but my heart is closer to the air."

My Left Breast has captivated reviewers. "Sharing the details of her story with the audience, as if at a kitchen table over a cup of coffee, Miller is not a victim," commented McPherson. "She is a survivor with a personal story and a unique perspective." Jo Ledingham, reviewer for the Vancouver Courier, remarked: "Never smarmy, 'My Left Breast' is recommended viewing for anyone whose life has been affected by breast cancer, and that's just about everyone." Miller received an Obie Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, both in 1994, for My Left Breast.

Among the subjects Miller has examined in her numerous other plays are writing, campus life, sexuality, abortion, motherhood, marriage, and friendship. In Contemporary Dramatists, a contributor stated "Miller's language providers part of her plays' fascination." This contributor also points out that "Miller chooses as her characters writers and others in the arts, usually women in crisis or transition, women experiencing problems living with others or in their own skin."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

PERIODICALS

American Theatre, April, 2002, "Susan Smith Blackburn Prize," p. 11.

Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1981.

Choice, January, 1990, review of Rescuing the Subject, p. 790; September, 1998, review of Assuming the Positions, p. 117.

College Composition and Communication, May, 1990, review of The Written World, p. 227; May, 1990, review of Rescuing the Subject, p. 227; December, 1991, review of Textual Carnivals, p. 510.

Modern Language Review, January, 1991, review of Rescuing the Subject, p. 147.

New York Times, April 13, 1979, June 8, 1979, February 15, 1981, February 7, 1982.

University Press Book News, March, 1991, review of Textual Carnivals, p. 33.

Vancouver Courier, September 19, 1999, Jo Ledingham, review of "My Left Breast."

ONLINE

1501 Broadway Theatre.com,http://www.1501broadway.com/ (October 24, 2003), "Voices in Contemporary Theatre: Wendy Wasserstein, Susan Miller, and the Woman's Voice in Contemporary Theatre."

Anchorage Press Online,http://www.anchoragepress.com/ (October 24, 2003), T. Massari McPherson, "One Survivor's Story: My Left Breast explores playwright's triumph over cancer."

Boston Phoenix Online,http://www.bostonphoenix.com/ (October 24, 2003), Tamara Wieder, "Battle Scars: In My Left Breast, Playwright Susan Miller Chronicles Her Struggle with Breast Cancer."

Bucknell University Web site,http://www.bucknell.edu/ (October 24, 2003), Kathryn Kopchik, "Miller Presents One-Woman Play."

Oakland University Web site,http://www.oakland.edu/ (October 24, 2003), Lisa Mumma, "Empowering Women: Two Plays Examine Self-Acceptance."

Off Off Off Theater Review,http://www.offoffoff.com/ (October 24, 2003) Joshus Tanzer, "'Acts' and You Shall Receive."

Pennsylvania State University Web site,http://www.psu.edu/ (September 10, 1998), Karen Trimbath, "Play a Personal Story of Loss, Rejuvenation."

Publishing Triangle Web site,http://www.publishingtriangle.org/ (October 24, 2003).

Shameless Hussy Productions Web site,http://www.shamelesshussy.com/ (October 24, 2003).

University of Arizona Daily Wildcat Online,http://wildcat.arizona.edu/ (April 24, 1994), Keri Hayes, "Play Focuses on Writer's Actual Life Experiences."

Vassar College Planet Online,http://www.vassar.edu/ (October 24, 2003), "Mysterious Connections Explored in 'A Map of Doubt and Rescue' at Vassar, June 30—July 2."

Writers Guild of America, East Web site,http://www.wgaeast.org/ (October 24, 2003).*