Playing for Time

By Arthur Miller

A searing drama of the Holocaust—and the remarkable, moving story of the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra
 
Paris, 1942. Fania Fénelon, a popular Jewish nightclub singer, is arrested by the occupying Germans. Sent to Auschwitz in a packed freight-car, shorn of her hair, tattooed with an identifying number, starved, and subjected to harsh labor, she loses all traces of her former self. But her life at the camp changes dramatically when she is drafted into the Women’s Orchestra, a desperate little ensemble that marches the prisoners out to work and gives concerts for the German high brass. Led by Alma Rosé, a sternly ambitious German-Jewish conductor who knows that her job is a matter of life and death, Fania and her fellow musicians must confront the horror taking place around them while pushing themselves to create beauty in the midst of despair.
 
Based on Fania Fénelon’s memoir of the same name, Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time was first produced as a CBS television drama starring Vanessa Redgrave before being adapted for the stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781101992012

Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he began work with the Federal Theatre Project. His first Broadway hit was All My Sons, closely followed by Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge. His other writing includes Focus, a novel; The Misfits, first published as a short story, then as a cinema novel; In Russia, In the Country, Chinese Encounters (all in collaboration with his wife, photographer Inge Morath) and 'Salesman' in Beijing, non-fiction; and his autobiography, Timebends, published in 1987. Among his other plays are: Incident At Vichy, The Creation of the World and Other Business, The American Clock, The Last Yankee, and Resurrection Blues. His novella, Plain Girl, was published in 1995 and his second collection of short stories, Presence, in 2007. He died in February 2005 aged eighty-nine.

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Cover for Playing for Time

PENGUIN PLAYS

PLAYING FOR TIME

ARTHUR MILLER (1915–2005) was born in New York City and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall and Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), and The American Clock (1980). His other works include Focus, a novel (1945); The Misfits, a cinema novel (1961); and the texts for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books in collaboration with his wife, photographer Inge Morath. His memoirs include Salesman in Beijing (1984) and Timebends, an autobiography (1987). His short fiction includes the collection I Don’t Need You Anymore (1967), the novella Homely Girl, A Life (1995), and Presence: Stories (2007). His later work includes the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), and Mr. Peters’ Connections (1999); Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000; and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). Among numerous honors, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award.

BY ARTHUR MILLER

PLAYS

The Golden Years

The Man Who Had All the Luck

All My Sons

Death of a Salesman

An Enemy of the People

The Crucible

A View from the Bridge

After the Fall

Incident at Vichy

The Price

The Creation of the World and Other Business

The Archbishop’s Ceiling

The American Clock

Playing for Time

The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

Broken Glass

Mr. Peters’ Connections

Resurrection Blues

Finishing the Picture

ONE-ACT PLAYS

A View from the Bridge (one-act version)

A Memory of Two Mondays

Fame

The Reason Why

Elegy for a Lady (in Two-Way Mirror)

Some Kind of Love Story (in Two-Way Mirror)

I Can’t Remember Anything (in Danger: Memory!)

Clara (in Danger: Memory!)

The Last Yankee

SCREENPLAYS

Playing for Time

Everybody Wins

The Crucible

The Misfits

MUSICAL

Up from Paradise

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Timebends

REPORTAGE

Situation Normal

In Russia (with Inge Morath)

In the Country (with Inge Morath)

Chinese Encounters (with Inge Morath)

Salesman in Beijing

FICTION

Focus (a novel)

Jane’s Blanket (a children’s story)

The Misfits (a cinema novel)

I Don’t Need You Any More (stories)

Homely Girl, A Life (a novella and stories)

Presence: Stories

COLLECTIONS

Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, Volumes I and II

The Portable Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944–1961 (Tony Kushner, editor)

Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1964–1982 (Tony Kushner, editor)

Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1987–2004 with Stage and Radio Plays of the 1930s and 40s (Tony Kushner, editor)

ESSAYS

The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (Robert A. Martin, editor)

Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000 (Steven R. Centola, editor)

On Politics and the Art of Acting

VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS

Death of a Salesman (Gerald Weales, editor)

The Crucible (Gerald Weales, editor)

ARTHUR MILLER

Playing for Time

A screenplay based on the book by Fania Fénelon

PENGUIN BOOKS

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eISBN 978-1-101-99201-2

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performance of this drama is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom and the rest of the British Commonwealth, and of all countries covered by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artist Works, the Pan-American Copyright Conventions, the Universal Copyright Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including but not limited to professional and amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, television and radio broadcasting, video and sound recording, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed upon the matter of readings, permission for which must be secured in writing. Inquiries should be addressed to ICM Partners, 730 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019.

Cover design by Jim Tierney

Version_1

Contents

About the Author

Also by Arthur Miller

Title Page

Copyright

A Note on the Text

PLAYING FOR TIME

A Note on the Text

The text in this volume is the version preferred by Arthur Miller and should be considered the authoritative text.

Fade in on Fania Fénelon singing. Her voice is unheard, we hear only the opening music.

Cut to a sidewalk café in the afternoon. German soldiers relax, accompanied by French girls. We are in German-occupied Paris, 1942.

Cut to the Nazi flag flying over the Arc de Triomphe.

Cut to Fania accompanying herself on the piano in a Parisian ballad warmed with longing and wartime sentiment. The audience, almost all German troops and French girlfriends, is well-behaved and enjoying her homey romanticism, which salts their so-far epic conquests with pathos and a bit of self-pity.

Nothing in her manner betrays her hostility to Nazism and its destruction of France in the recent battles. She hopes they are enjoying their evening, promises to do what she can to help them forget their soldierly duties; but to the knowing eye there is perhaps a little extra irony in a look she casts, a smile she pours onto the upturned face of a nearby officer that suggests her inner turmoil at having to perform for the conqueror. She is radiant here, an outgoing woman who is still young and with a certain heartiness and appetite for enjoyment.

She is roundly applauded now at the number’s end, and she bows and backs into darkness.

Cut to a train of freight cars, moving through open French farmland.

Cut to the inside of one freight car. It is packed with people, many of them well-dressed bourgeois, sitting uncomfortably jammed in. The ordinariness of the types is emphasized, but above that their individuation. Moreover, while all are of course deeply uneasy and uncomfortable, there is no open alarm.

A husband is massaging his wife’s cramped shoulders.

A mother is working to remove a speck from a teenage daughter’s eye.

Worker types survey the mass with suspicion.

A clocharde—a beggar woman off a Paris street—wrapped in rags, and rather at home in this situation, surveys the company.

A second mother pulls a young boy away from a neighbor’s bag of food.

Chic people try to keep apart; they are soigné, even bored.

Students are trying to bury themselves in novels.

Two intellectuals scrunched up on the floor are playing chess on a small board.

A boy scout of twelve is doing his knots on a short rope.

An old asthmatic man in a fur-collared coat is urged by his wife to take his pill. He holds it between his fingers, unhappily looking around for water.

Cut to Fania, dressed in a beautiful fur coat and fur hat; her elegant valise is at her