Jason Miller: Playwright, Actor and Director

The Masonic Temple, with a huge theater inside, was a short walk up the street, and Harris wanted to see it and get the lay of the stage. Miller and I had been inside scores of times and decided to wait outside.

Suddenly, Miller walked up the steps to the temple, and out of nowhere, began reciting from a play, I believe it was something from Shakespeare.
He continued this tour de force while I clapped and chanted “bravo,” and people walking up and down the street may have thought we were two lunatics.

One of Miller’s goals was to write a book covering 50 years of Irish history, including the labor movement, the coal mines (he went into the mines to see the dangers for himself) and injustice to the Irish on all fronts, including the confiscation of their land by Britain.

During one of our conversations, he said: “It’s very suspicious that there’s a famine in Ireland in the mid-19th century that was blamed on a virus, while Ireland’s population decreased from 8 million to 3.5 million. It’s curious that a ‘famine’ lasted five years.”

Miller served as Artistic Director of the Scranton Public Theatre for many years and also continued to work outside. He starred as Henry Drummond opposite Malachy McCourt as Matt Brady in Inherit the Wind. The play opened in Scranton and then transferred to Philadephila where it had an extended run in the Courthouse, and broke the city’s record for long run plays.

Malachy remembers Miller: “It was a  challenge to attempt to come near his performance, but he made sure it didn’t defeat. You would find yourself giving the performance of your life. He was very good company. He had an extraordinarily bright and incisive mind – always tinged with paranoia. ‘They were doing something,’ whoever they were. I was always worried about him. He was constantly on about how he was going to stop drinking and going to stop smoking, and I was trying to be helpful without being preachy . . . in that sense he was quite self destructive.”

Miller continued to work. He toured the country in his one-man play Barrymore’s Ghost, which ended with a four-month run Off-Broadway.

He began working on a screenplay with his son Joshua (by  Susan Bernard). On May 13, 2001, he attended a wake for the mother of Judge James Walsh.  He and his companion Dana Oxley  continued on to have lunch with friends at Farley’s Pub and Eatery in Scranton. He was alive and well at one moment, but in the next moment he was gone. It was a fatal heart attack.

Funeral services were held at St. Patrick’s Church, West Scranton, and among the attendees was actor Martin Sheen and others who had roles in That Championship Season.
A Roman Catholic nun bristled when asked by the press if she thought Miller might have been drinking too much. “How can you say that?” she shot back. “Everyone likes a drink every once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with it. And look what he’s done for Scranton,” she said.

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