MILLER, Jason 1939(?)-2001

PERSONAL: Born c. 1939, in Long Island, NY; died of a heart attack, May 13, 2001, in Scranton, PA; son of John (an electrician) and Mary (a special education teacher) Miller; married Linda Gleason, 1963 (marriage ended); married Ruth Josem (separated); children:

(first marriage) Jennifer, Jason Patric, Jordan; (with actress Susan Bernard) Joshua. Education: University of Scranton, B.A., 1961; attended Catholic University of America, 1962-63.

CAREER: Playwright and actor. Worked as messenger, waiter, truck driver, welfare investigator, and actor in New York City. Film and television actor appearing in such films as The Exorcist, 1973, and Nickel Ride, 1975, also on television in Bell System Family Theater, 1975. Scranton Public Theater, actor and director, late 1980s-2001.

AWARDS, HONORS: New York Drama Critics Circle Award, 1972, and Best Play citation, both 1972, and Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award, and Pulitzer Prize in Drama, both 1973, all for That Championship Season; Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, 1973, for The Exorcist.

WRITINGS:

plays

Lou Gehrig Did Not Die of Cancer (one-act play), first produced in New York, NY, at Equity Theater, March 2, 1970.

Nobody Hears a Broken Drum (three-act play; first produced Off-Broadway at Fortune Theater, March 19, 1970), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1971.

That Championship Season (first produced Off-Broadway at New York Shakespeare Festival Theatre, May 2, 1972; produced on Broadway at Booth Theatre, September 14, 1972; adapted as a screenplay by Miller for a movie of the same name, Cannon, 1982), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1972.

Barrymore's Ghost (solo show; produced in U.S. cities, 1997), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1997.

Also author of one-act plays Perfect Son and The Circus Lady.

other

Stone Step (poetry), privately printed, 1968.

SIDELIGHTS: Award-winning playwright Jason Miller achieved his greatest success with the play That Championship Season in 1973. The story of a basketball team that reunites each year to celebrate their past glory as state champions, the play was welcomed by critics as a traditional well-made play with a flair for realistic dialogue and characterization.

Miller once told Glen Loney of After Dark: "I'm not committed to any one style or vision—or one concept of the theater." The playwright did, however, have definite ideas about theatrical form. "For an audience psyche—if there is such a thing as a collective audience psyche—story or plot is necessary," he commented to Loney. "Perhaps that feeling stems from an instinct for design, for an ordering of experience. Roughly, that's what Aristotle said. Perhaps he's right. Again, I don't know. But it's absolutely imperative that other forms of theater flourish. Old-fashioned plays and derivative European Absurdism—anything. I think the theater should never strap itself down to one definition, one style or one type of performance. As for the well-made play idea, I prefer to write that way. In terms of 'well-made' having the connotations of 'craft,' I believe in craftsmanship."

Set in Miller's hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, That Championship Season is about George Sikowski, James Daley, Tom Daley, and Phil Romano, four middle-aged men, once members of a championship high school basketball team, who gather in an annual reunion to honor their coach and relive their memories. They are now grown men, with layers of betrayal and deceit that have turned them bitter and unhappy, unable to recapture the glory of being state champs. As secrets are exposed and lies are uncovered, it is up to Coach to bring the men back together. His pep talk reminds them of the champions they once were.

"That Championship Season was born out of my own sense of personal failure," Miller once told the New York Times. "When an Off-Off Broadway play of mine, Nobody Hears a Broken Drum, lasted exactly two and one-half hours and I had to watch the crew members auctioning off pieces of the set, I started examining the nature of failure. I had to ask myself what type of men would harbor a sense of failure. In the process, I was also forced to account for my own values."

That Championship Season received an Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award and a Pulitzer Prize after its first run on Broadway in 1973. The play was revived in 1999 at the Second Stage Theatre in New York. "Though fairly conventional in its construction, the work is unsparing in its exposure of the corruption, ruthlessness and denial permeating these disappointed men," said Variety reviewer Charles McNulty. "That it's also fiercely entertaining suggests how well the playwright's cunning observations are comically deployed." David Sheward of Back Stage said that while the play has "not aged well," when Miller wrote That Championship Season in the early 1970s, he gave it "a spin of political and social relevance" by addressing such topics as the Vietnam War and the corruption of President Nixon. He called the play "a psychic strip show as layers of illusion are removed and the lives of the five characters are exposed for the mediocre messes they are." Miller later adapted That Championship Season to a screenplay, and the film rights were acquired by Playboy Productions.

A talented writer for stage and screen, Miller was an exceptional actor as well. After the success of That Championship Season, Miller concentrated on acting. His portrayal of Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1973. Miller appeared in other films, playing the title character in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, and portraying Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian in Rudy.

"When I'm acting," Miller once told the New York Times, "I'm not on an ego trip, so I try to enter into a close collaboration with the writer. And the same applies vice versa. Most good actors have a sense of character and dialogue. The trick is to create it on paper and to live with the discipline. Acting is a communal experience, whereas writing is a solitary one."

In 1997, Miller traveled to cities throughout the United States producing his one-man show, Barrymore's Ghost. The show also appeared on stage at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September, 2000. The solo show is told from the perspective of John Barrymore. The festival billed the play as "a one man tour de force that explores the mythology of the Barrymore Family in all its wit, terror, agony and hope."

At the end of his career, Miller served the Scranton Public Theater as an actor and director. Miller passed away from a heart attack in 2001. He had been working on a film script about Jackie Gleason, and he and his son, Joshua, were writing a play titled Me and My Old Man. Miller once told People that he was always writing. "I'm still searching, still looking for a story I can put onstage that will have universal implications. I haven't made my mark yet—only a scratch."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 2, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1974.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

periodicals

After Dark, January, 1972.

Back Stage, April 30, 1999, David Sheward, theater review of That Championship Season, p. 56; May 18, 2001, p. 49.

Newsweek, September 25, 1972.

New Yorker, March 28, 1970; May 20, 1972.

New York Post, September 23, 1972.

New York Times, March 20, 1970; September 15, 1972; May 8, 1973; February 10, 1974.

People, February 7, 1983, movie review of That Championship Season, p. 18.

Variety, April 26, 1999, Charles McNulty, theater review of That Championship Season, p. 56; May 28, 2001, p. 63.

OBITUARIES:

books

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001, p. 469.

periodicals

Back Stage, May 18, 2002, p. 49.

Chicago Tribune, May 16, 2001, section 2, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2001, p. B10.

New York Times, May 15, 2001, p. A20.

Variety, May 28, 2001, p. 63.

Washington Post, May 16, 2001, p. B7.*