When "Death of a Salesman" first appeared on Broadway, the opening night intermission saw some people in the lobby weeping and others asking the tall, thin, recognizable playwright,  "How did you know the story of my father (or brother, or uncle)?"  Arthur Miller had struck a chord in his audience that reverberated around the world.   Since that night fifty years ago, the play has been translated into many languages and seen on stages throughout the world.  It was a great success in Beijing, China, where the occupation of salesman is unknown. 

"Salesman" was an instant box-office hit, although the producers had earlier urged Miller to change the name of the play, as the word "Death" in a title traditionally meant box office poison.  Miller told them, "If you want to produce a play with a different name, go ahead.  My play is called 'Death of a Salesman.'"  Actually, when Miller began the work, he called it "Inside his Head," referring to Willy's memories of the past that arise concurrent with the action of the present.  

Willy's philosophy of life is voiced in a memory of the past, when he advised his two teen-age sons:  "Be liked and you will never want."  Personality spells success to Willy, and as a salesman he believes it is more important to be likable than it is to sell a quality product. We never know what it is that Willy is selling.  "He is selling himself," explains Miller.  Willy's hero is his brother Ben, whose ghost appears from time to time to remind Willy that  "he walked into the jungle when he was seventeen, and when he came out, he was rich."

One of Willy's problems is that he cannot divorce the world of his illusions, his "pipe dreams," of success, from the world of reality in which he lives, a world where refrigerators and cars break down and where the son of the boss, despite promises made to Willy, fires him.  Willy may have "the wrong dreams," as his son Biff charges, but he is a provider for his family, one who goes to work every day, driving long distances and carrying his heavy sample cases, until he is too old for such strenuous endeavors.  As his wife Linda tells their two sons, "Attention must be paid."  

Not Willy but his wife Linda holds the family together.  Because she loves Willy, she puts up with his slights and his disparagement; she keeps the two sons in line and lashes into them when they leave their dazed father in a restaurant and go off with two women they have just picked up. Reviewers of the current production were pleased and surprised at the strength Elizabeth Franz demonstrates as Linda, but the characterization is all in the text. (See my book Understanding Arthur Miller for further discussion of Linda.)   

            Brian Dennehy received a "best actor" Tony award in recognition of his impressive portrayal of Willy.  Like the original Willy, Lee J. Cobb, Dennehy’s Willy is huge, so that his fall is a resounding one.  Yet Dustin Hoffman, short and fragile, was an unforgettable, vulnerable Willy, his small size contrasting with his big boasts. Originally, Miller had to defend the play as a tragedy, arguing that the fall of an ordinary man could be just as tragic as that of kings and princes in classic works.  Few would argue any longer that the play is not only a tragedy, but one that in Aristotle's definition, moves the audience to pity for the protagonist and fear for himself. Willy, says Miller, is "at the edge of the abyss."  Perhaps it is Willy as a tragic Everyman, fearing that abyss, frozen on the edge, unable to retreat or to go ahead into the unknown that evokes a universal response to this modern tragedy.

Arthur Miller, on Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman":

            "He cannot bear reality, and since he can't do much to change it, he keeps changing his ideas of it. . . . You must look beyond his ludicrousness to what he is actually confronting. . . .There is a nobility, in fact, in Willy's struggle.  Maybe it comes from his refusal ever to relent, to give up."  Quoted in Understanding Arthur Miller by Alice Griffin, University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
 

“All My Sons,” Arthur Miller’s 1947 Broadway hit, has been universally praised in its revival at the Royal National Theatre, where it is running in repertory through October 18, his eighty-fifth birthday.  Another American revival is SRO at the Donmar Warehouse—Nicholas Hytner’s excellent production of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending,” starring Helen Mirren. 

With an excellent cast and set, “All My Sons” is a revelation of Miller’s skillful use of dramatic tension and climax as he treats with compassion the family conflict that would be the theme of his next work, “Death of a Salesman.”  In the intimate Cottesloe Theatre, William Dudley has created the back of a white clapboard house, with its screen-door, porch, and back yard with overhanging trees, lawn, and wooden garden furniture.   Director Howard Davies begins the play with a night storm, only mentioned in the text, into which Kate Keller wanders dreamlike, to witness lightning strike the little tree that is a memorial to her son, killed in World War II three years earlier. 

As delineated by Miller so completely and realistically as to make you understand and care about them, Kate and Joe Keller and their son Chris at first seem like the typical American family, but conflict soon arises, and mounts in intensity with each new revelation.  Joe Keller is a congenial, self-made successful businessman, manufacturing household appliances.   During the war he and his partner turned out airplane parts for the U.S. Army, but one day, with Joe at home supposedly ill, his partner shipped out cracked cylinder heads, in the belief that the fault would be discovered in time to prevent their use.  But they were used in planes, resulting in the deaths of twenty-one pilots.  After a trial, the partner goes to jail but Joe is exonerated.  

Brash, outspoken, proud of his practicality and brief education, Joe believes that it doesn’t get any better than achieving his version of the American dream – earning good money and spending it on material things: steaks (absent during the war), new houses with long driveways, dining and dancing.  In an excellent performance, James Hazeldine brings Joe to life.  His son Chris, effectively played by Ben Daniels, is just the opposite of Joe.  He has been through the war, seen the men he led die, and realized their sacrifice: “they didn’t die, they killed themselves for each other.”  He had hoped that he and the other survivors were returning home to a better world, where the war would have changed people, but he was wrong; to them, he says, the war had no more impact than “a bus accident.”  Far from improving, the war profiteers were even more materialistic.  “Nickels and dimes,” says Joe, attempting to explain the shipment of faulty parts, “it all comes down to nickels and dimes.”   

As wife and mother, Julie Walters is not only superb, but she brings such depth to the role of Kate as to make it equally important with those of the men in the family.  Although the text is clear as to her importance, early productions tended to downplay the roles of the women in Miller’s works.  In the original “Death of a Salesman,” for instance, Mildred Dunnock played Willy’s wife Linda as secondary, whereas in the most recent Broadway production, because of the way Linda was acted, she was recognized as strong, the one who holds the family together.

Kate is convinced that their older son, Larry, is still alive, although he was reported as missing some three years earlier.  While she is warm and friendly with the neighbors, she is hostile to Ann, Larry’s former fiancée, whom Chris wishes to marry.  Well played by Catherine McCormack, Ann is the Kellers’ former next-door neighbor and daughter of Joe’s jailed partner.  Kate’s anxiety mounts when she learns that Ann’s lawyer brother has been to visit their father.  “Be smart,” she cautions Joe, “be smart.”  Miller believes that the past colors our actions in the present, and he unfolds that past in the twenty-four hours during which the play takes place.  Joe’s and Kate’s guilty secret is revealed, and idealistic Chris has a final confrontation with his father.  To Joe’s defense that he did what any other man would do, Chris replies, “I didn’t think of you as a man; I thought of you as my father.”

Miller’s play at the National is gripping theater, and it concerns a family conflict that is both personal and universal. The playwright convincingly dramatizes his conviction that we have a responsibility to the world outside our family, that the lost pilots, Joe finally realizes, are “all my sons.”
 

The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

Arthur Miller, as one would expect, makes both a moral and a philosophical point in “The Ride Down Mt. Morgan,” but his play is a comedy; its subject, as traditionally with comedy, is sex.  This is “Death of a Salesman” turned inside out. The central character, aptly titled Lyman Felt, is a former insurance salesman who has built an empire and acquired sports cars, planes, homes – and two wives, one in a swanky apartment in Manhattan and the other in upstate New York, site of one of his branch offices.  Charming, daring, and confident, Lyman feels he is entitled to it all.  Patrick Stewart is superb in the role, wearing a Clinton-like gray wig and believing and persuasively arguing, like the man he resembles, that he has done nothing wrong.

The wives’ view is different.  Although he points out when discovered, they too have enjoyed and profited from their marriages to Lyman, irreparable harm has been done, not only to them but to the child each has borne to Lyman, who swears he loves both women.  Under Lyman’s bonhomie, there is also a need for human contact, so desperate one snowy night in upstate New York that he risks driving down icy Mt. Morgan, resulting in the accident that precipitates the action.

Michael Blakemore has skillfully directed what the printed text reveals as a most difficult work to stage.  The scenes move back and forth in time, and the character of Lyman is a complex one: the audience must empathize with his position as well as those of the wives.  On paper, Lyman (only one letter change from Loman, Miller’s great tragic hero) is less sympathetic than in the flesh, especially as interpreted by Stewart, who has created leading Shakespearean roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In revising the play since it appeared in London and off Broadway in 1991, Miller has simplified it, deleting Lyman’s dead father, who wanders in and out of Lyman’s hospital room and who represents Lyman’s fear of death, a fear confined to dialog and action in the revision.  But Miller has retained the silly scene of Lyman’s fantasy of the two women on pedestals contending for Lyman’s sexual favors by flaunting their culinary skills.

The end is as meaningful as it is expected.  Both women leave Lyman.  And he is left to question even his material gains as he is filled with envious wonderment at his nurse’s delight in her family’s ice-fishing, wearing the new shoes they have purchased at bargain prices.

Mr. Peters’ Connections

 “Mr. Peters’ Connections” is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an aging American.   As Miller says in his Preface, “Mr. Peters is in that suspended state of consciousness which can come upon a man taking a nap, when the mind, still close to consciousness and self-awareness, is freed to roam from real memories to conjectures, from trivialities to tragic insights, from terror of death to glorying in one’s being alive.”

 The locale, in Peter J. Davison’s set, is dreamlike: gauzy cubist skyscrapers rise behind a derelict night-club with its chairs and a player piano piled in a corner.  Incongruously, an Eames chair and stool at stage left provide a seat for Peters who, as the play begins, wanders in from the audience with a new pair of shoes in a box, and proceeds to try them on. Some of the characters are alive, like Peters and his wife, and a young couple named Leonard and Rose, who is pregnant.  Others are dead, like Peters’ earlier love, Cathy-Mae, and his brother Charley who also appears as Calvin, the manager of the premises

 As Miller observes in his Preface, “the dead in memory do not quite die and often live more vividly than in life.”  Or as T. S. Eliot writes in “Little Gidding,” “And what the dead had no speech for, when living,/ They can tell you, being dead.”  The difference between Miller’s new play and “Death of a Salesman” and “After the Fall,” both of which introduce characters from the past who are now dead, is that Mr. Peters’ dead return as the dead, not as their living selves in episodes of the past relived in the present.  The effect is eerie.  Cathy-Mae is seen as a beautiful blonde doing a strip-tease behind a scrim, but she soon “freezes” into the stiffness of the dead.  She says nothing, only, at one point, breathes as Peters listens to her chest and recalls the ocean and footsteps; then she emits a hollow, dying cry.   

 As in a dream, there are no transitions or connections; the thread that ties them together is Mr. Peters’ seeking a meaning, asking for connections, as he keeps repeating “What is the subject?”  We glean that Harry Peters retired eighteen years ago as a Pan Am pilot and before that, served as a pilot in World War II, of which he is proud: “Behind our propellers we were saving the world.”  And then he asks, “Where has all the sweetness gone?”  One thing about the war, he says, is that you had no fear, because “we were good and they were bad.”  “The thing is,” he cautions young Leonard, “not to be afraid.”  Leonard replies, “We’re afraid.”

 In the corner, under ragged blankets, sits a black bag lady, Adele, who comments on the action from time to time, or volunteers information, like a catalog of the “extras” on her mother’s Buick.  She, says Miller, “is neither dead nor alive, but simply Peters’ construct, the to-him incomprehensible black presence on the dim borders of his city life.”  She may represent Death, although her remarks are often humorous.

 There is more humor in the work than one would expect from the subject matter.  The young couple earnestly believe in the significance of what one eats or drinks.  Rose recommends bananas and Leonard, avoiding lead in the water, the cause of the downfall of the Roman empire.  Calvin the night-club manager assumes several guises, including that of Peters’ brother Charley.  At first, Calvin pretends to be a Russian musician.  Dropping the accent, he relates a history of the building in which they find themselves – formerly a bank, from behind whose polished grills customers were regarded with suspicion, then a library – and all the characters speak in whispers.  Next, it was a night-club, as suggested by the furnishing, but Vietnam, and “the little men in their black pajamas,” says Calvin, put an end to all night-clubs.

In each encounter with Calvin aka brother Charley, “the competition between them is very much alive in Peters’ mind along with its enduring absurdities,” notes Miller.  One of the humorous absurdities is the brothers’ contesting whose feet are more narrow.  The next moment can be a tragic-comic one, when Peters undergoes the older person’s temporary loss of memory, as he cannot remember his wife’s name and must run down the alphabet to recall that it is “Charlotte.”  To top that, he cannot remember his own name either.

A frightening episode is Peters’ conjecture of the man Cathy-May might have married, a bully who calls her a whore for not wearing underwear, and leads her by a dog leash. Also chilling are the stiff stances Cathy-Mae and Charley assume as the dead, especially when Charley also turns on the audience his colorless eyes. As produced by the Almeida Theatre in London and on tour, and expertly directed by Michael Blakemore, this tragic-comic, chilling, and always engrossing play ends with Peters asking another question in his search for connections.  To the strains of Brahm’s lullaby, as his child (formerly Rose) nestles up to him, speaking of love, he asks, “I wonder could that be the subject?”