DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller on the set
of Streetcar in New York in 1949.
This is probably the most famous play in the American canon. It opened in New York in 1949. At the end of the first performance, there was stunned silence for over a minute. Then the audience began to applaud, slowly at first, and then enthusiastically. Never had an audience in America been so moved. The applause has not stopped since.
Great American actors in their prime long to play Willie Loman: Lee J. Cobb, Paul Muni, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, and just this past year, Brian Dennehy -- in New York again -- and again to rave reviews.
The play has even achieved international stature. In 1980 it played very successfully for over a year in China -- where there are no salesman. In fact, it has played on stages all over the world, and every culture is as moved by the play as are Americans because at its heart the play is about family and the struggle for success and dignity.
Salesman was preceeded by Miller's first Broadway success -- All My Sons (1947). The tragic hero of this play, Joe Keller, is a precursor of Willie Loman. Valuing success over human life, Joe has intentionally sold defective airplane parts to the military in WWII ironically causing the death of his own son who flies one of the defective planes. Other pilots are killed as well. This family secret is concealed until the end of the play when Joe must face the enormity of his mistake and the realization that they were "all my sons."
In 1953 at the height of the red-baiting McCarthy era, he wrote The Crucible, a parable about the evils of mass hysteria and political witch-hunting based on the real-life witch trials of Salem, Massachussetts in 1692 where close to 100 people (mostly women) were burned at the stake or hanged after being accused of witchcraft. For his artistic courage Miller was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) set up to flush out suspected communists both in the government and in private life, particularly in the entertainment industry. But Miller refused to "name names." He was black-listed for a while, but earned world-wide respect as a person who displayed the courage of his convictions.
Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe for 5 years (1956 - 61). He married her after her divorce from Joe Di Maggio. There is the stuff of great theater in both of these marriages, but that script has yet to be written. Joyce Carol Oates, however, has just published a fictional-biography entitled Marilyn (2000).
Arthur Miller is still alive and still writing plays, mostly in London because he feels the New York stage is no longer congenial to "new" plays since such dramas are commercial risks. Miller likes solitude when he writes. Early in his career he used to write every morning for hours in a SHED which he built himself. Much of Salesman was written there.
Death of a Salesman is only partially realistic. The setting for the play is the Loman house in Brooklyn, but set directors have never tried to re-create a solid "realistic" looking house on stage. The house is always abstractly constructed sometimes with just poles to indicate walls and rooms. There are upper level acting areas for the bedrooms. The play moves back and forth in time and the flashback scenes are staged downstage left or right. Usually these scenes are illuminated with a spot.
The original title for the play was "The Inside of His Head." Miller always intended that when Willie thinks about the past, what he is remembering is all of a sudden fluidly re-created on stage. Thus, entrances and exits need not be strictly motivated except by the stream of Willie's memories. Also keep in mind that while the play covers the whole of Willie's life, we meet him on stage -- in present time --- on the last day of his life when he has already started to loose control and the thought of suicide has become a palpable reality. In his 1987 autobiography, Timebends, Miller later calls this fluidity of dramatic sequencing "timbending" -- a mingling of memory and hallucination with present reality.
Miller has also written a considerable amount of theater criticism, the most famous of which is perhaps his essay for the New York Times entitled, "Tragedy and the Common Man," in which Miller argues that tragic heroes need not be Kings and Princes like Hamlet and Oedipus, but ordinary human beings who each day struggle for dignity and a sense of self-identity in a increasingly materialistic and de-humanizing world. This world famous essay is easy to fine on the Web.
Enjoy the show!