Friends, family, and fans packed Broadway’s Majestic theater yesterday to memorialize Arthur Miller, the playwright to whom, in Tony Kushner’s words, “there is, of course, an unpayable debt.”

While Mr. Kushner was referring specifically to the debt of all succeeding American playwrights, other speakers, too, said they felt indebted to Miller, who died February 11 at 89.

A former senator and presidential candidate, George McGovern, said he used the line “Attention must be paid,” from Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” as the title of a speech he gave in Milwaukee in 1972. He credited the speech with helping him win the Wisconsin primary.

“In the literary world, he was a sequoia,” the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, who gave opening and closing remarks, said. “He was one of God’s favorite atheists.”

Playwright Edward Albee extolled Miller’s formal experimentation in later plays. “When Arthur was getting on in years, he decided to become young,” Mr. Albee said. He also excoriated critic Hilton Kramer for publishing a less-than-laudatory obituary of Miller, and cited Miller’s outspoken left-leaning politics. “Arthur believed that art could teach us something, that it would lead us to the proper way to live and to vote,” Mr. Albee said, adding, in one of the event’s few applause lines, “It is the far right that can bring America to its knees.”

Miller’s son, Robert, took the podium at the 1,600-seat Majestic to read part of a letter the playwright wrote to the House Un-American Affairs Committee after being subpoenaed to testify before it in 1956. Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to “name names” of acquaintances who he knew had communist affiliations. The conviction was later overturned on appeal. Miller wrote to the committee that naming names “would be a travesty of my labor itself,” meaning his body of plays, which included by that time “The Crucible.”

Readings from Miller’s plays were given by Bill Bolcom and Michael Sommese, who acted a scene from “A View from the Bridge”; Miller’s daughter, Joan Copeland, who read a scene from “The American Clock,” and Estelle Parsons, who gave a hair-raising reading of Linda Loman’s graveside soliloquy from “Death of a Salesman.”

Daniel Day-Lewis, Miller’s son-in-law, read a section of Miller’s book “Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000” (2001), which was by turns giddy and dark, about Miller’s Brooklyn job as an early-morning, bicycle-mounted, house-to-house bread delivery boy. One snowy morning, “a special kind of hell broke loose.” Miller wiped out and mixed up the order. “Give a bagel man an onion roll by mistake and you’ve ruined his day.”

Poet Honor Moore, a longtime Miller friend, recalled Miller’s gift for conversation. “The Miller dinner table was actually a kind of sorcerer’s workshop,” Ms. Moore said. Once, she asked him what caused him to become a writer, and Miller surprised her with an unfamiliar story. “I was a terrible kid,” Miller told Ms. Moore. “I drove my mother crazy.” One day, the family took a vacation without bothering to tell Miller, he said, leaving him at home with the family’s Polish maid. “That was when I learned to use my imagination.”

Mr. Kushner spoke of Miller’s “Emersonian temperament,” and said he “had the curse of empathy, even for the enemy.”

“A loyalist only to the human race, he manifested that loyalty by being true only to himself,” Mr. Kushner said. He said his acquaintance with Miller began with an evening of contemplating the back of Miller’s head while seated behind him at the 1994 Tony awards. This was “more interesting than anything that transpired on stage that night,” Mr. Kushner said, adding that he was in debt to the brain that had conceived of “Death of a Salesman.” “I wanted to touch the head, but thought the owner might object.”

The memorial ended with a video montage of interviews with the voluble Miller, some set at his country home in Connecticut. In a February appearance on “The Charlie Rose Show,” he was asked about his feelings about death. “I think it gives our lives significance,” Miller said. “Imagine if you didn’t die. What a horror that would be. There would be no – nothing to measure your life against. When you die, you want to – you’re adding things up.”

Asked by Mr. Rose what he would like his epitaph to say, Miller responded simply, “Writer.”