A Memory of Two Mondays, dismissed by one critic as ‘uninterruptedly bad’ and another as a ‘pedestrian chronicle’, is a play which Miller insisted was written with much affection. The result was neither pedestrian nor warm-hearted. Most of the characters are stunned into spiritual immobility, passing the time as the seasons change. Set in what is plainly the Chadick-Delamater warehouse on Sixty-third Street and Tenth Avenue where he had worked, and where Lincoln Center would one day be built, it presents a collective portrait of those he had known as he waited out time before going to the University of Michigan. In effect, his life had been on hold. The difference was that he would be moving on. This was a means to an end. For those whose lives he observed it seems to have become both means and end.

Those who work in the warehouse plainly have private lives but we see nothing of them, only receive reports, mostly hinting at private pain, an existence which generates little beyond despair and frustrated dreams. These are hidden behind stories of drunken evenings and nights on the town which leave little beyond the taste of irony. These lives seem to have no more content than the dull routines of a workaday life which simulate the cohesiveness of community.

A Memory of Two Mondays may have started out to capture the lives of ordinary people but at its heart is a sense of dismay at those he would once have been inclined to celebrate as the source of political energy.