SALON PACKET BY ARTHUR MILLER DIRECTED BY JOSEPH HANREDDY Salon Packet Production and Design by Brian McDonald

Transcription

1 SALON PACKET BY ARTHUR MILLER DIRECTED BY JOSEPH HANREDDY Salon Packet Production and Design by Brian McDonald Season Sponsored by Leatrice Luria Death of a Salesman is sponsored by Sara Miller McCune and Dana White with additional sponsorship from Elaine and Herbert Kendall Chuck and Missy Sheldon Peter and Debby Stalker Theater League

2 ABOUT THE PLAY CONTENTS Synopsis 4 History of the Production 4 ABOUT the playwright Biography: Playwright David ives 5 The School for Truth by David Ives 6 Why write for Theatre? by David Ives 8 David Ives Quotes 9 Plot Differences The School for Lies Vs the Misanthrope by Cole Remmen 10 Relevance Truth and lies, yesterday and Today by Cole Remmen 11 Use of Modern Language in The School for Lies by Cole Remmen 12 Historical Context 17th Century French Social Etiquette edited by Maura J. Graber 13 Modern Language in The school for Lies by Cole Remmen 14 ConText on the Misanthrope by Cole Remmen 15 Commedia Influence in the school for lies by Cole Remmen 18 Understanding Different types of Satire by Luke Edley 19 Glossary 20 Classroom AcINTRODUCTION

3 Ensemble Education and Outreach INTRODUCTION Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller was first performed in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate success. This deceptively simple story of the tragic road to suicide of a traveling salesman struck an emotional chord with American audiences. This critically acclaimed production ran for 742 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle. Since then Death of a Salesman has become one of the most performed and adapted plays in American theatrical history. Miller packed the play with issues that many Americans had to deal with in 1949, a time of great change in our nation after two world wars and the great depression. Like Willy, who faces the end of his career, what was to happen to millions of Americans working in obsolete industries? What was a family to do on the brink of dire economic circumstances? How would one generation deal with the shifting values of the next? We find ourselves asking similar questions today. It should be no surprise, then, that Death of a Salesman continues to speak to us about our own condition. Set amidst a racially and economically diverse Brooklyn in the 1940s, the Lomans tale takes on a larger significance both then and now. While Miller tackles the social question of the effect the capitalistic American Dream myth has on an ordinary family, its enduring appeal seems to lie in the fact that Miller tapped into the hopes and fears of not only an American but a global public. Universal human questions about the nature of happiness and success, of aging and of family responsibility are tackled. Willy Loman has the quality of an everyman, whose struggle to attain his dreams of success resonates within us all. But it is not just the themes of the play that ensured its success. Miller was so innovative with form and skilled with language that he created a style that was accessible to any audience yet produced a multi-layered piece of theater. These qualities have confirmed the play s place in the canon of classic literature and ensured that since its premiere, there has never been a time when Death of a Salesman was not being performed somewhere in the world. 3

4 Death of a Salesman Salon Packet THE PLAYWRIGHT Arthur Miller ( ) from active service in the Second World War, Miller worked as a fitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and wrote radio scripts. He also wrote two novels during this time - Situation Normal (1944), a volume of material about army life, and Focus (1945) about anti-semitism. Miller had not, however, given up on playwriting. In 1944, his play The Man Who Had All the Luck won a prize offered by New York City s Theatre Guild and received a Broadway production. The show, though, was not very lucky: it closed after only four performances. It was not until three years later that Miller was able to find success on the stage. His play All My Sons debuted to positive critical reviews in 1947, and it was a big hit with audiences as well. This play established him as a significant voice in American theater. In his review of Miller s play, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote, The theater has acquired a genuine new talent. The play also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Donaldson Award, voted upon by subscribers to Billboard Magazine. Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan, New York City, near the lower edge of Harlem in His father was a comfortably middle-class manufacturer of women s coats, and his mother was a school teacher. The Miller family moved to Brooklyn in the early l930s because the Great Depression had plunged them into great financial difficulty. These years of poverty and struggle influenced many of his plays. After he graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, Arthur Miller spent the next two and a half years working as a stock clerk in an automobile parts warehouse until he had saved enough money to attend college at the University of Michigan. He finished college with financial aid from the National Youth Administration and from the money he earned as night editor of the Michigan Daily newspaper. While there, Miller began to write plays, several of which were rewarded with prizes. Upon graduating from college in 1938, Miller returned home to New York, where he married Mary Grace Slatter and had two children, Jane and Robert. While back home, Miller also joined the Federal Theatre Project, an arts program sponsored by the U.S. government. However, before his first play could be produced, the project ended. After a college football injury kept him Arthur Miller later described the impact of All My Sons on his life: The success of a play, especially one s first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that had not been there before. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more. Two years later, with Death of a Salesman, Miller did indeed dare and risk more. Likewise, he gained more as well. With this play, Arthur Miller soared to new artistic heights and critics began to regard him as one of the greatest twentieth-century American playwrights. The play was a huge popular success, and ran for 742 performances at the Morosco Theater, New York. The play also won a Pulitzer Prize. The next several years were very good for Miller, during which time he had several hit plays, culminating with The Crucible, which debuted on Broadway in 1953, during the height of Senator Joe McCarthy s congressional investigations into un-american activities of U.S. citizens (which mostly meant involvement with the Communist Party). The early l95os were a very tense time in American history; the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union made many Americans extremely worried about the safety and future of their nation, and Miller reflected the paranoia and hysteria of the time in The Crucible. As a result, Miller was denied a passport to Belgium to attend the opening of The Crucible there. Later, he was called to testify before the House Un-American Ac- 4

5 Ensemble Education and Outreach tivities Committee and was asked to tell the committee members the names of U.S. citizens who were involved in Communist activities. Miller refused, and was thus cited with contempt of Congress, a serious crime. This conviction, however, was overturned by the Supreme Court in The mid-50 s were also very turbulent times in Miller s personal life. In 1956 he divorced his wife and married actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, whom he had first met in Hollywood in the early 1950 s. This event brought him great notoriety and caused a media sensation, but in 1961 it also ended in divorce. Miller married photographer Inge Morath in They had two children, Rebecca and Daniel, although Daniel had Down Syndrome and was placed in an institution soon after his birth. Miller still wrote up until his death in 2005, although from the mid-eighties his work was more highly valued in London, where critical and popular success was much warmer than in the United States. He is revered as one of America s greatest playwrights who helped to define American drama. Miller was also the author of The Misfits (1961), a screenplay for his second wife, Marilyn Monroe; and Timebends: A Life (1987), an autobiography. His books of reportage with photographs by Inge Morath, his third wife, include In Russia (1969) and Chinese Encounters (1979). Among Miller s other plays include A View from the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964), The Price (1968), The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991), Broken Glass (1994), and Resurrection Blues (2002). Miller won seven Tony Awards, an Olivier Award, an Obie Award, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the Jerusalem Award. Miller with his third wife, Inge Morath, at their Roxbury home, (Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Image Archive) 5

6 Death of a Salesman Salon Packet TIMELINE OF ARTHUR MILLER 1915: Arthur Miller is born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and lives in the Upper West Side, where his father maintains a successful tailoring business. 1931: Two years after the New York Stock Exchange crashes, the bankrupt Miller family moves to Brooklyn. Arthur plays football with other boys from Brooklyn including Julius and Philip Epstein, who will become the screenwriters of Casablanca, and goes on to play for James Madison High School s football team. (A football injury that Miller suffers during high school later prevents him from serving in the military during WWII.) 1933: Miller graduates from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. 1934: Already rejected once, Arthur Miller re-applies to the University of Michigan. Upon receiving a second denial, Miller makes a personal appeal to the dean of the university to reconsider. Miller is ultimately admitted on a conditional basis; in order for him to remain at Michigan, he must consistently earn high marks. To pursue his college degree, Miller leaves his job at Chadwick Delamater, a Manhattan automobile warehouse formerly located where Lincoln Center now stands, and moves to Ann Arbor, Michigan. 1949: Death of a Salesman opens at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway. The play earns Miller a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and his second Drama Desk Award. Elia Kazan, a frequent collaborator with Miller, directs the play. 1953: Miller premieres The Crucible. The play, dealing with mass hysteria, is partly inspired by the conversations Miller had with Kazan, when Kazan confessed his intention to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and reveal individuals he believed to be Communist sympathizers. As a result, Miller, believing that this was a betrayal of artistic collaborators, did not speak to him for many years. 1955: Miller premieres two new works in New York: A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays. 1956: While writing The Crucible, Miller begins to court actress Marilyn Monroe. After a costly divorce from his first wife Mary, Miller marries the Hollywood star; Miller refuses to cooperate with HUAC investigators. 1938: Arthur Miller graduates from the University of Michigan. during his college career, his writing had earned him two Hopwood awards for drama, in addition to a national scholarship from the Theatre Guild s Bureau for New Plays. After returning home to Brooklyn, Miller begins writing radio plays for the Federal Theatre Project and, that summer, marries his high school sweetheart Mary Grace Slattery. 1941: Miller juggles several jobs to support his family: he is a worker in a box factory, a scriptwriter for U.S. war bond advertisements, and a shipfitter s helper in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He continues to write plays in his free time. 1944: Miller s play The Man Who Had All the Luck premieres on Broadway and closes after only four performances. Miller s first child, Jane, is born. 1947: All My Sons opens to great success. It beats Eugene O Neill s The Iceman Cometh for the Drama Desk Award, and Miller celebrates by buying himself a Studebaker convertible. The play also draws interest from the F.B.I., who consider it to be Communist propaganda. Miller s second child, Robert, is born. 1948: Miller builds a small cabin in Roxbury, Connecticut, and begins writing Death of a Salesman there Arthur Miller convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name associates who were alleged Communists. 1960: Miller works on his second screenplay The Misfits, starring his wife Marilyn Monroe. Their four-year-old marriage is already on shaky ground, and, by 1961, the couple divorces. 1962: After meeting on the set of The Misfits, photographer Inge Morath and the writer quickly develop a relationship and marry in Their first child together, Rebecca, is born later that year. 1964: Incident at Vichy and After the Fall debut in New York; both plays deal with Miller s attempts to dramatize the events around the Holocaust. After the Fall also marks Miller s reunion with Elia Kazan. 6

7 Ensemble Education and Outreach 1965: Miller is elected to the Presidency of PEN international, an international association of writers whose mission is to advance literature worldwide and protect freedom of expression : Miller works throughout the nation to raise awareness of and to protest American intervention in Vietnam. Highlights include a teach-in at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, as well as rallies across the northeast, including one on the New Haven green. 1966: Miller s youngest son, Daniel, is born. Shortly after his birth, Daniel is diagnosed with Down syndrome. Following common medical advice at the time, Miller sends him to live in an institution. Miller s distant relationship with Daniel has been shrouded in secrecy and has been a source of criticism and controversy. 1968: The Price opens in New York. That same year Death of a Salesman sells its millionth copy. 1972: One of Miller s few attempts at comedy, The Creation of the World and Other Business, opens in New York but closes after twenty performances. Two years later, his musical adaptation of the play, Up From Paradise, opens in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 1977: The Archbishop s Ceiling opens in Washington D.C. to poor reviews. However, its successful staging in London in 1985 begins an Arthur Miller revival in England. 1980: The American Clock opens but is quickly closed after a tepid response. His play for television about musicians in a Nazi concentration camp, Playing for Time, airs. 1982: Elegy for a Lady and Some Kind of Lady make their premiere in New Haven at the Long Wharf Theatre, the first plays produced to inaugurate their new building. When the Long Wharf opened in 1965, they produced The Crucible as their first show : Miller s plays I Can t Remember Anything, Clara, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, The Last Yankee, and Broken Glass premiere in New York. His screenplay Everybody Wins is filmed and released : The Signature Theatre Company in New York dedicates its entire season to staging Miller s work. 1998: Mr. Peter s Connection premieres in New York. 2002: Resurrection Blues opens in Minneapolis the same year that Miller s wife, Inge Morath, dies. 2005: Arthur Miller passes away at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut DON T BE SEDUCED INTO THINKING THAT THAT WHICH DOES NOT MAKE A PROFIT IS WITHOUT VALUE - ARTHUR MILLER 7

8 Death of a Salesman Salon Packet IN HIS OWN WORDS Willy is foolish and even ridiculous sometimes. He tells the most transparent lies, exaggerates mercilessly, and so on. But I really want you to see that his impulses are not foolish at all. He cannot bear reality, and since he can t do much to change it, he keeps changing his ideas of it. Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing,

9 Ensemble Education and Outreach The first image that occurred to me which was to result in Death of a Salesman was of an enormous face, the height of the proscenium arch, which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man s head. In fact, The Inside of His Head was the first title. It was conceived half in laughter, for the inside of his head was a mass of contradictions. The Salesman image was from being absorbed with the concept in life that nothing in life comes next but that everything exists together and at the same time within us; that there is no past to be brought forward in a human being, but that he is his past at every moment and that the present is merely that which his past is capable of noticing and smelling and reacting to. I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman s way of mind. But to say wished is not accurate. Any dramatic form is an artifice, a way of transforming a subjective feeling into something that can be comprehended through public symbols. Its efficiency as a form is to be judged at least by the writer by how much of the original vision and feeling is lost or distorted by this transformation. I wished to speak of the salesman most precisely as I felt about him, to give no part of that feeling away for the sake of any effect or any dramatic necessity. What was wanted now was not a mounting line of tension, nor a gradually narrowing cone of intensifying suspense, but a bloc, a single chord presented as such at the outset, within which all the strains and melodies would already be contained. The strategy was to appear entirely unstrategic. If I could, I would have told the story and set forth all the characters in one unbroken speech or even one sentence or a single flash of light. As I look at the play now its form seems the form of a confession, for that is how it is told, now speaking of what happened yesterday, then suddenly following some connection to a time 20 years ago, then leaping even further back and then returning to the present and even speculating about the future. Arthur Miller, Introduction to Collected Plays, 1957 To me the tragedy of Willy Loman is that he gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it. It is the tragedy of a man who did believe that he alone was not meeting the qualifications laid down for mankind by those clean-shaven frontiersmen who inhabit the peaks of broadcasting and advertising offices. From those forests of canned goods high up near the sky, he heard the thundering command to succeed as it ricocheted down the newspaper-lined canyons of his city, heard not a human voice, but a wind of a voice to which no human can reply in kind, except to stare into the mirror at a failure. Arthur Miller, The Salesman Has a Birthday, The New York Times, February 5,

10 Death of a Salesman Salon Packet INSPIRATION for Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller once said that everything he had written was based on somebody he had seen or known... Death of a Salesman began as a short story that Miller wrote at the age of seventeen while he was working for his father s company. The story told of an aging salesman who cannot sell anything, who is tormented by the company s buyers, and who borrows change for the subway from the story s young narrator. After finishing the story, Miller wrote a postscript on the manuscript saying that the real salesman on whom the story is based had thrown himself under a subway train. Many years later, on the eve of the play s Broadway opening, Miller s mother found the story abandoned in a drawer. In his autobiography Timebends, Miller related that he found inspiration for that short story and the play in his own life. Miller based Willy Loman largely on his own uncle, Manny Newman. In fact, Miller stated that the writing of the play began in the winter of 1947 after a chance meeting he had with his uncle outside the Colonial Theatre in Boston, where his All My Sons was having its pre-broadway preview. Miller described that meeting in this way: I could see his grim hotel room behind him, the long trip up from New York in his little car, the hopeless hope of the day s business. Without so much as acknowledging my greeting he said, Buddy is doing very well. Miller described Newman as a man who was a competitor at all times, in all things, and at every, moment. Miller said that his uncle saw my brother and I running neck and neck with his two sons [Buddy and Abby] in some horse race [for success] that never stopped in his mind. He also said that the Newman household was one in which you dared not lose hope, and I would later think of it as a perfection of America for that reason...it was a house trembling with resolution and shouts of victories that had not yet taken place but surely would tomorrow. The Loman home was built on the foundation of this household. Manny s son Buddy, like Biff in Miller s play, was a sports hero, and like Happy Loman, popular with the girls. And like Biff, Buddy never made it to college because he failed to study in high school. In addition, Miller s relationship with his cousins was similar to Bernard s relationship with Biff and Happy in Salesman. As Miller stated: As fanatic as I was about sports, my ability was not to be compared to [Manny s] sons. Since I was gangling and unhandsome, I lacked their promise. When I stopped by I always had to expect some kind of insinuation of my entire life s probable failure, even before I was sixteen. In Timebends Miller described Manny s wife as the one who bore the cross for them all supporting her husband, keeping up her calm enthusiastic smile lest he feel he was not being appreciated. One can easily see this woman honored in the character of Linda Loman, Willy s loyal but sometimes bewildered wife, who is no less a victim than the husband she supports in his struggle for meaning and forgiveness. Miller met many other salesmen through his uncle, and they influenced his perception of all salesmen. One man in particular struck Miller because of his sense of personal dignity. As Miller stated in Timebends, this man like any traveling man... had, to my mind, a kind of intrepid valor that withstood the inevitable putdowns, the scoreless attempts to sell. In a sense [all salesmen are] like actors whose product is first of all themselves, forever imagining triumphs in a world that either ignores them or denies their presence altogether. But just often enough to keep them going, one of them makes it and swings to the moon on a thread of dreams unwinding out of himself. Surely, Willy Loman is such an actor, getting by on a smile and a shoeshine, staging his life in an attempt to understand its plot. Because he was so deeply involved in the production of All My Sons, Miller did not give the meeting with his uncle more than a passing thought, but its memory hung in his mind. In fact, Miller described the event as the spark that brought him back to an idea for a play about a salesman that he had had ten years previously the idea that he had written as a short story. In April 1948 he drove up to his Connecticut farm and began to write the play that would become Death of a Salesman. As he sat down before his typewriter in his ten by twelve-foot studio, he remembered all I had was the first two lines and a death. From those humble beginnings, one of American theatre s most famous plays took shape. 10

11 Ensemble Education and Outreach WRITING Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller wrote the following passages for his autobiography, Timebends. With [the play] A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams had printed a license to speak at full throat, and it helped strengthen me as I turned to Willy Loman...I had known all along that this play could not be encompassed by conventional realism, and for one integral reason: in Willy, the past was as alive as what was happening at the moment, sometimes even crashing in to completely overwhelm his mind. I wanted precisely the same fluidity in the form [of Death of a Salesman]. By April 1947 I felt I could find such a form, but it would have to be done in a single setting, in a night or a day. I did not know why. I stopped making my notes in our Grace Court house in Brooklyn Heights and drove up alone one morning to the country house we had bought the previous year. In reality all I had was the first two lines and a death Willy and It s all right. I came back. I started writing one morning...[and] wrote all day until dark, and then I had dinner and went back and wrote until some hour in the darkness between midnight and four. I had skipped a few areas that I knew would give me no trouble in the writing and gone for the parts that had to be muscled into position. By the next morning I had done the first half, the first act of two. When I lay down to sleep, I realized I had been weeping - my eyes still burned, and my throat was sore from talking it all out and shouting and laughing. I would be stiff when I woke, aching as if I had played four hours of football or tennis and now had to face the start of another game. It would take some six more weeks to complete Act II... I did not move far from the phone for two days after sending the script to [director Elia Kazan]. By the end of the second silent day, I would have accepted his calling to tell me that it was a scrambled egg, an impenetrable, unstageable piece of wreckage. And his tone when he finally did call was alarmingly somber. I ve read your play. He sounded at a loss as to how to give me the bad news. My God, it s so sad. It s supposed to be. I just put it down. I don t know what to say. My father... He broke off, the first of a great many men - and women - who would tell me that Willy was their father. I still thought he was letting me down easy. It s a great play, Artie. I want to do it in the fall or winter. I ll start thinking about casting. He was talking as though someone we both knew had just died, and it filled me with happiness. On the play s opening night, a woman who shall not be named was outraged, calling it a time-bomb under American capitalism. I hoped it was, or at least under the bullshit of capitalism; this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator waving a paid-up mortgage at the Moon, victorious at last... Pictured: Director, Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller 11

12 Death of a Salesman Salon Packet THE SETTING This Is America by Michael Walkup, Production Dramaturg, Yale Repertory Theatre Arthur Miller sets Death of a Salesman, his exploration of the elusiveness of the American Dream, in the quintessentially American city of Brooklyn. (Actually, the term city only properly applies to Brooklyn until 1898 when it officially became incorporated as one of New York City s five boroughs.) Brooklyn occupies Kings County on eighty-one square miles at Long Island s western tip and is connected to neighboring Manhattan by three bridges, one tunnel, fourteen subway lines, one ferry service, and a pugnacious wariness of being consumed by the cosmopolitan bully across the East River. We recognize Brooklyn from images of its high-stooped brownstones and eponymous bridge, as the setting for numerous sitcoms from The Honeymooners to The Cosby Show, and as the home of Brooklynese, a much-imitated accent popularized by Hollywood through surly WWII soldiers and down-on-their-luck street toughs. Brooklyn s many distinct neighborhoods offer snapshots of the American melting pot. The ethnic communities of Brooklyn were for decades synonymous with their neighborhoods names some still are. There have long been Jewish residents in Brighton Beach and Flatbush; African Americans moved into Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville after WWI; Italians still congregate in Bensonhurst; and Vinegar Hill near the Manhattan Bridge used to be known as Irish Town. Though the quiet of these Brooklyn neighborhoods is sometimes disturbed by intense parochialism, the borough is united in its resistance to being ranked second after the more genteel Manhattan. Such pride and doggedness have earned Brooklyn its reputation as the hardscrabble borough of striving families. There s more space here, and it s cheaper by the square foot. There are more family-friendly businesses, and fewer skyscrapers blotting out the blue. The first half of the twentieth century saw Brooklyn in ascendance: the Brooklyn Navy Yard brought thousands of workers to the borough during the two World Wars, and new subway lines built in the 1930s made for an easy commute between Brooklyn and Manhattan. A spike in housing construction after WWI expanded the borough s residences so that by the mid-1920s it surpassed Manhattan as the most populous borough of NYC, a predominance it maintains to this day. Kenneth T. Jackson, a NYC historian, claims that as many as one-quarter of all Americans can trace their heritage to one-time Brooklyn residents. Because of its role as a way station for such a large portion of the population, Brooklyn boasts a number of iconic American landmarks. Ebbets Field home to the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 to 1957 bordered diverse neighborhoods in central Brooklyn until it was demolished to make way for high-rise apartments. Prospect Park, a 19th-century city-beautification project designed by the same architects as Manhattan s Central Park, spans 585 pacific acres just blocks away (the architects considered Prospect Park the more successful project). Coney Island, at the south tip of the borough, was home to such classic amusements as the Cyclone roller coaster and the Steeplechase, and every summer visitors elbowed each other on the boardwalk waiting in line for a Nathan s hot dog. Death of a Salesman opens in the Lomans home in Brooklyn in The small, single-family unit is described by Miller in a stage direction as crowded on all sides by the towering, angular shapes of new apartment buildings. Miller never specifies in which neighborhood the Lomans live, rather his play evokes an almost mythic Brooklyn. 12

13 Ensemble Education and Outreach A TRAGEDY OF A COMMON MAN From Midsummer Magazine, 1991 Oedipus, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, Othello or Willy Loman. Must classic tragedy embrace just the Aristotelian fall of princes, or may it also include the modern common man? Playwright Arthur Miller believes that the common man can be a center of dramatic interest, and he demonstrated this belief in Death of a Salesman, a tragedy about a very common common-man: a salesman from Brooklyn. Winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for 1949, Death of a Salesman combines realism and surrealism in the story of a small man swallowed up in a world of sham and shoddy values. Willy Loman is bewildered, well-intentioned, and unsuccessful: Suddenly I realize I m going sixty miles an hour, and I don t remember the last five minutes. His sons are upset by his peculiar behavior and his hallucinatory conversations with the figures from a happier past, and they worry about the effect on their compassionate mother, who loves her husband and recognizes that his actions stem from the brutal difference between fact and fancy. This story of a common man, victimized by his own fake values and those of mod- ern America, caught the imagination of theatre audiences immediately. Months prior to its premier Feb. 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway, the word was out and the public was storming the box office. This time the public was right. Critics acclaimed Death of a Salesman as a great play of our day, and lavished upon it such accolades as superb, rich, and memorable. John Chapman s review called it a very fine work in the American Theatre, with script, staging, setting, and acting all in perfect combination. John Glassner proclaimed the play one of the most powerful and moving plays of our time, representing a culmination of American playwrights efforts to create a significant American drama. (Arthur Miller, incidentally, was barred from an afteropening-night supper held on the set. The waiters didn t recognize him.) Death of a Salesman was forceful enough to warrant superlatives and the honors it received, but what a year on Broadway! The 1949 competition was fierce. Opening that season were The Madwoman of Challiot, Anne of a Thousand Days, Summer and Smoke, South Pacific, a revival of Private Lives, Light Up the Sky, and Kiss Me Kate. Lee J. Cobb was the original Willy Loman. Dustin Hoffman, long an admirer of the play, played the leading role in a greatly acclaimed television production in So, we must ask what is behind the honors. If this modern story is destined to challenge classic tragedy, or perhaps to take its place alongside, we must look behind the glitz and glitter to find a message. If for instance, as Miller suggests in his autobiography, Timebends, the struggle in Death of a Salesman was simply between father and son for recognition and forgiveness, it would diminish in importance. However, he continues, when the struggle extends itself out of the particular family circle and into the lives of each of us, it broaches the questions that trouble all of us: social status, social honor and recognition, success. When we are brought to feel what Willy Loman feels, the play expands its vision and moves from the specific toward the fate of man. We become Willy Loman, and his struggle becomes our struggle. In an essay titled The Family in Modern Drama, Miller expands this concept: We are all part of one another, all responsible to one another. The responsibility originates on the simplest level, our immediate kin. But this vital attachment is germinal and with the maturing of the person extends beyond its initial source. The family is pivotal, he suggests, but beyond the immediate family is the family of mankind. Connection with others, the need to feel others as a part of ourselves and ourselves as a part of them is an impulse native to all of us. We call people without this connectedness sick. Yet we see this prime impulse constantly being impeded and crippled. Miller s work dramatizes and depicts the forces that induce these impediments. All plays we call great, he continues, let alone all those we call serious, are ultimately involved with some aspect of a single problem: how may a man make of the outside world a home? How and in what ways must he struggle, what must he strive to change and over- come if he is to find safety, love, ease of soul, identity, and honor? Miller repeatedly searches in his writing for answers to these questions. In Situation Normal, Watson, a soldier training to be an officer is afraid his backwardness in mathematics may lead to his rejection for commission as an officer, which would seem to him like a betrayal of his company companions, to whom he has become deeply attached. This expression of a bond among brother combatants in the army is echoed in All My Sons, the story of a manufacturer whose defective airplane parts cause the death of his son and other aviators in wartime. The sinner defends his malfeasance as being perpetrated on behalf of his family, and is brought to understand that to his son, Chris, there is indeed something bigger than the family: there is the family of mankind. Proctor, in The Crucible, chooses to die rather than live and besmirch his name, and in The Price, one son gives up opportunities which might have led to success equal to that of his brother, and the son has done this on behalf of a father who was hardly worth the sacrifice. What is the matter with you people? asks a character in The Victor. Nothing in the world you believe, nothing you respect. How can you live? You think that s the smart thing... that s so hard what you re doing. Let me give you a piece of advice. It s not that you can t believe nothing, that s not so hard, it s that 13

14 Death of a Salesman Salon Packet you ve still got to believe it. That s hard. And if you can t do that, my friend, you re a dead man. Miller s work has variety but also an essential, overriding unity. Willy Loman speaks not of success, so much as of being well liked. He has given up a small inclination toward carpentry in order to become a salesman because it promises a brighter future of ease and affluence, and by turning away from himself he has become an utterly confused person. He dreams the American legend: the brother who walked into the jungle and came out of it rich. William when I walked into the jungle, I was 17. When I walked out I was 21. And... I was rich. Willy sees everything in this light: the good will of the boss, the business contact, glad-handing, being impressive. He can no longer recognize his own reality, or why he has failed. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there s nobody to live in it. Thus he wreaks havoc on his own life and that of his family. Unaware of what warped his mind and behavior, he commits suicide in the conviction that a legacy of $20,000 is all that is needed to save his beloved but also damaged offspring, all that is standing between them and success. When Miller was asked in what way his plays were related to the events of his life, he replied that in a sense all his plays were autobiographical. He was born in Manhattan in 1915, middle class and Jewish. His grades were not high, and he apparently didn t read a serious book before he was seventeen. Finally gaining entrance to the University of Michigan, he wrote a play which won several small prizes, and he realized he could indeed become a playwright. Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe from 1956 to He wrote about her in Timebends: Comics on the whole are deeper, are somehow closer to the crud of life and suffer more than do the tragedians, who are at least accorded professional credit for seriousness as people. He also tells us in Timebends about Manny Newman, his uncle, who was a salesman. Manny greeted the Broadway opening of All My Sons with the information that Buddy (Manny s son) is doing very well. I thought I knew what he was thinking, Miller writes, that he had lost the contest in his mind between his sons and me. There in the lobby I still felt some of the boyhood need of his recognition. At the same time, I knew that in reality he was not much more than a bragging and often vulgar little drummer. I had not the slightest idea of writing about a salesman then, but that was the genesis. I suppose, however, that if Willy Loman could be taken apart, five or six salesmen I have met would be found in him. Miller has captured the tragedy of the American common man. He knows our lower middle class as few others do, and Willy Loman is his supreme character creation. Loman is a pathetic fool, but he is totally recognizable to laugh at, to commiserate with, or to deplore. At his funeral a friend points out, Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory. RISE TO FAME In recounting the final twenty-four hours of Willy Loman s frustrated life in Death of a Salesman, Miller strove to create a new form of theater that would convey the simultaneity in the way the memories of past events collide in one s mind with current occurrences. Seeing tension as the very stuff of drama, Miller wanted to re-create in a play what he saw as the contradictory forces that operate on people past against present, society against individual, greed against ethics. His first title had been Inside of His Head, but that was quickly replaced, along with Miller s original concept of having the scenes play out inside a stage representation of a giant head. Again directing, Kazan brought along the stage and lighting designer Jo Mielziner with whom he had successfully worked on Tennessee Williams s A Streetcar Named Desire to help visualize what would become one of the American stage s most iconic set designs. As Brenda Murphy explains, Mielziner s designs combined translucent scenery, expert lighting effect, and sets that went, as the eye travelled upward, from drab realistic interiors to light, delicate frameworks that were mere suggestions of buildings, which she terms subjective realism. 2 Miller wanted a set that would convey aspects of both the claustrophobic present and the idealized past within the same space, and Mielziner obliged with an inventive use of scrims and lighting in a design that allowed all the scenes to be played out with minimal stage management. The forestage was essential to allow for breakout space to play the scenes beyond the Lomans house. Through this format, Miller, Kazan, and Mielziner suggested a whole new way of presenting a play on stage, and it would become increasingly influential. The play s tremendous impact was also due to the authenticity of its depictions. This is perhaps the reason why Miller despite the expressionistic elements of the play was wrongly dubbed a realist for many years. Miller had grown up around salesman and knew the pressures they faced, especially in a changing society that no longer did business in the ways it once had. By the 1940s, planned obsolescence was affecting people as much as innovative appliances, and Miller s rendition of an everyday family trying to find its way to success in a society unsupportive and unsympathetic toward failure hit a distinctive cultural nerve in an America increasingly materialistic and intolerant of failure. The problems faced by the Loman family have since proven timeless and transcultural, representative of all people struggling to navigate their lives in societies inherently hostile to their dreams. As the playwright Marsha Norman suggests, In writing about Willy Loman, Arthur Miller wrote about all of us, about our indestructible will to achieve our humanity, about our fear of being torn away from what and who we are in this world, about our fear of being displaced and forgotten. 14

15 Ensemble Education and Outreach Miller recognized the social and historical forces operating against the Loman family. From the wagon-laden peddlers who often made their own wares, such as Willy s father, through the early drummers like David Singleman, traveling by rail, down to the car-driving Willy, whose traveling days are clearly coming to a close when business is no longer done with a smile and a handshake, the play neatly depicts a history of American business practices. Willy is being replaced by a new kind of corporate salesman. This is modeled by Happy, who toils as assistant to an assistant buyer, stuck in a store. Willy s boss, Howard, seduced by technology and time-management studies, is fast moving toward a pared-down workforce and automation, illustrating the dehumanization of the worker with scientific and engineering advances. At times comic, yet also poetic and tragic, with a realistic veneer that made it easy to involve any audience, Salesman was a new type of serious drama that merged the forms of realism and expressionism to suggest new directions and possibilities for all of American drama, as well as offering a challenge to previous definitions of tragedy. Against much opposition, Miller argued for Willy Loman s status as a modern tragic hero. Not a highborn or even intelligent figure, Willy s nobility lay in his willingness to lay down his life rather than accept the erasure of his dignity. Miller pled his case in two controversial articles in the New York Times, Tragedy and the Common Man, and On Tragedy, which redefined the way American dramatists, in particular, would view the genre. For Miller, In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star. Thus, tragedy could be drawn from the travails of anyone who refuses to give up what he deems his rightful position in society. Miller s tragedies ask audiences to examine and perhaps even fix the social flaws that create such circumstances. Miller produced many essays over his career in which he expounded his opinions on theater, politics, history and social theory, thus indicating a desire to be not just a playwright, but someone who might shape the direction of American drama, if not America itself. In its effectiveness as a human story, a cultural commentary, an engaging theatrical experience, and a tremendously successful stage experiment, Death of a Salesman is perhaps Miller s most important play; however, the play that followed, The Crucible a reaction to Miller s concern regarding what he saw as the bullying behavior of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and the morality of informing on others has become his most produced one. Like Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, although written to address a specific historical climate 1950s McCarthyism through the lens of the 1692 Salem witch hunts has remained powerfully relevant, in part because The Crucible is a study of the nature of society itself. It effectively conveys striking lessons on the responsible role of authority and the rights and needs of the individual which speak to people who have never heard of Salem or Senator McCarthy. As Matthew Roudané suggests, The Crucible remains a powerful theatrical experience precisely because it continues to define key political and religious issues of a nation as such issues are reflected within the private anxieties of the individual. 5 Another modern tragic hero, the play s central protagonist John Proctor, must confront his own culpability through his past affair with Abigail, the girl whose accusations have initiated the witch trials. Mapping the typical progression of so many of Miller s characters, from betrayal and/or guilt through to the embrace of active responsibility, Proctor comes to an existential self-awareness that gives his self-sacrifice to preserve his own name and the names of others a timeless relevance. A person s name, for Miller, is the trope by which his characters convey a sense of their own moral and personal essence, and the loss of a name can only be devastating. Miller spent much of 1952 researching witch trials at the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts. Thus he ensured that the play would have an accurate historical basis that could guard him against accusations of creating a flimsy social satire. He also avoided trying to create a one-to-one analogy, which he felt would be reductive. Although The Crucible is more historically accurate than many of Shakespeare s plays, it was accused by some of being untruthful, and by others of making an unfair analogy. In hindsight, these seem like strategies to discredit its authority, but at the time it made it a highly controversial play to applaud for fear of being viewed as a red sympathizer. Combining what Brecht called historification by which the playwright would comment on current events through historical analogy with a more complex linguistic style of the agitprop plays of the 1930s that he admired, in The Crucible Miller produced a drama that addresses key social, moral, and political issues, yet also remains great theater that tugs at its audience s emotions. The Crucible has something for everyone: sympathies can be drawn to the disenfranchised black slave, the suppressed group of young women, the tortured souls of the unhappy and unlucky Proctors, or the self-important Reverend Hale who gets his certitude stripped away; audience distaste is fired up against the self-righteously pompous, the jealous and cold-heartedly venal, or the blind, rigid enforcement of painfully ridiculous reasoning and rules. Thus the play s impact and longevity are understandable. Miller himself was called to appear before HUAC after his marriage to Marilyn Monroe brought him into the spotlight. He refused to name names, telling the committee, I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on 15

16 Death of a Salesman Salon Packet RISE TO FAME Continued him. With this clear echo of the words he had put in the mouth of John Proctor three years earlier, Miller was cited for contempt and given a $500 fine and a thirty-day suspended jail sentence. Two years later, his conviction was overturned on the grounds that the questions he had been asked to answer served no legislative purpose. Elia Kazan, however, driven by his disgust at what communism had become under Stalin, and his need to work in Hollywood and abroad, had named names in 1952, and Miller swiftly terminated his close friendship with Kazan as a result. How close Miller had been to the Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s remains a matter of critical contention, and HUAC produced little firm evidence during his hearing. Miller s resistance was more moral than political, as he felt the HUAC hearings to be socially and psychologically harmful. It is certain that Miller, like Kazan and many others during that period, had seen hope for America in the socialist aspects of communism, but it is also clear that he held Stalin in contempt. In a recent study, Alan Wald explores Miller s initial alignment and later disillusionment with Soviet socialism, and posits that Miller may have written for New Masses in the 1940s under the pseudonym Matt Wayne. FLASHBACKS / DAYDREAMS In Death of a Salesman, this style (blending of Expressionism and Realism) is most obvious in the use of flashbacks or dream sequences. At the beginning of the play, Miller first of all provides an anchor in reality. He presents a series of events that are accepted by the audience as the objective reality of the play i.e. those sections of the play that take place in the present. We understand them as objective reality because we see various different characters perceptions of the events for example, Willy s breakdown is discussed by the boys and Linda; Jenny the secretary talks to Bernard before Willy enters. However, the play also shows the internal turmoil and psychological breakdown that Willy is experiencing by presenting what is going on in Willy s head. Sometimes this takes the form of the acting out of Willy s past experiences, sometimes in the appearance of Ben or The Woman in Willy s present. This style means that while the audience can share the nightmare experience of Willy s breakdown with him, we never lose touch with the real events even though Willy perceives reality in a distorted way. Miller described Willy as literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present. He did not see Willy s internal sequences as flashbacks. There are no flashbacks in this play but only a mobile concurrency of past and present because in his desperation to justify his life Willy Loman has destroyed the boundaries between now and then. - Arthur Miller 16