Arthur Miller has said that a central theme of American writing has been an argument with the American dream, and it has certainly been a central theme of his work. The tension between materialism and a sense of transcendence, of the poetic, has lain at the heart of many of his plays. The poet and the businessman, the visionary and the materialist, have done battle, sometimes within a single sensibility – Willy Loman, Quentin – sometimes spun off into separate and opposing selves: Arnold and Ben in No Villain, Chris and Joe Keller in All My Sons, Biff and Happy in Death of a Salesman, Victor and Walter in The Price. In the early 1990s, he returned to this dichotomy in a play in which a businessman debates with a craftsman and that craftsman with his wife.

At issue is an interpretation of experience, a clash of values. It expresses a sense of individuals and a society divided as to the purpose of their lives and the function of that society. It is a play, too, shadowed by history. It acknowledges that the debate goes back to the very beginnings of the Republic. It invokes if not a framer of the Constitution then one of those who argued over what this new democracy was to be, whether it was to favour the material over the spiritual, the rich over the poor.