In an article published in Harper's Magazine, in March 1999, Arthur Miller insists that ‘there is no such thing as “reality” in any theatrical exhibition that can properly be called a play. The reason for this is that stage time is not, and cannot be, street time. In street time, Willy Loman's story would take sixty-two years to play out instead of two and a half hours … with the very act of condensation the artificial enters even as the first of its lines is being written.’

Time and reality, then, are intimately related, while to enter a theatre is to acknowledge that we enter a time warp in which the normal laws of physics no longer apply. Time flows at a speed determined by the author. The price of entry into this world is that we experience a temporal anomaly in which past and present may co-exist within a factitious moment. And few writers have been as interested in time, and its various ramifications, as Arthur Miller – time, that is, as history, time as memory, time as a component of identity, as productive of guilt, nostalgia, hope, psychological and social imperatives. Even his concern with shaping language, with moulding speech into distinctive rhythms, is an aspect of his concern with time for, as Sam Shepard has remarked, ‘rhythm is the delineation of time in space’.

In his preface to Salesman at Fifty, Arthur Miller says, ‘As far as I know, nobody has figured out time. Not chronological time, of course – that's merely what the calendar tells – but real time, the kind that baffles the human mind.’