The 1970s was a decade of nearly devastating turmoil for the United States from which in many ways it is still recovering. The American incursion into Cambodia leading to the bloody protests at Kent State University, the withdrawal from Vietnam after years of divisive protest at home, South Vietnam’s eventual collapse, Watergate, and the resignation of a president under disgrace all shook the very foundation of a United States that was anything but united.

Miller created three works for the stage in the seventies that confronted and expanded upon the cultural divisiveness so prevalent then and still present today. The Creation of the World and Other Business and The American Clock each offered reflections on the issue of authenticating existence by assuming individual and collective responsibility for our various internal failures. These two plays, written in the early seventies, work well with the hard-hitting and existentially disturbing play, The Archbishop ’ s Ceiling (written in 1977 but only to receive its final, revised form in 1984), which confronts the questionable effects of our attempts to exercise that authenticity in a world that has lost moral control of its own destiny. Two plays present an ideal, and one puts the ideal into direct confrontation with the real, all three adding up to a serious debate on how that ideal can survive and affect the shifting reality it encounters. Interestingly, none of them directly confronts actual issues afflicting 1970s America, such as Vietnam or Watergate; rather, they move into somewhat unexpected realms in their search for cures to those immediate contemporary ills. The result is that they speak to us even today, unencumbered by any dated address to 1970s particulars.