Arthur Miller’s great demand was that attention be paid. His son Danny waited ten minutes away for nearly forty years for the same grace. In the winter of 1990 I was Arthur Kopit’s assistant through my Columbia MFA internship. I had helped him on his Phantom musical with Maury Yeston, and now the work was a staged reading of his new play at Circle Repertory in the Village, a theater with the size and polish of a garage. The play was called Bone-the-Fish, a savage comedy about Hollywood deal-making, and Kopit told me how he had named it. The title was his answer to David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Mamet’s title meant nothing, he argued, and it had found success anyway, so he imitated the trick and answered with nonsense of his own, aimed at the same target. Better heads prevailed later; when Circle Rep gave the play its full production, it went up as Road to Nirvana. Sigourney Weaver was in the reading. The actors sat on folding chairs with scripts in their laps. There were no sets, no lights to speak of, no money. My job that night was to watch the door for Arthur Miller. When he came in, I walked him quietly to the last row, and we sat together. He did not know I was an intern, did not know my name, knew nothing about me, and asked nothing. At some point he leaned over and whispered, with open disgust, “Oh, hell! This is only a staged reading?” I did not reply. The man next to me had written Death of a Salesman, and I was the intern who had seated him, proud to share his folding chairs.

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