"Death of a Salesman" in New Era

Because Arthur Miller's most famous play has become so ubiquitous, a sort of stand-in for American Drama, it feels impossible to stay that I like it. Or rather, I love it. And I mean that I love it as a particular thing, a work of art, outside of the weighty cultural legacy that it comes with. The funny thing is, I've never seen it staged. I read it for the first time in a humanities class my senior year of high school, and have returned to it several times in my annual play-reading binges. I wrote a short story called "On Being the Daughter of a Man in Prison" that appeared in Midwestern Gothic and draws heavily from "Death of a Salesman" -- the main character is cast as Linda in her high school production. Here is an excerpt:

At night, I practice my lines.

I’m cross legged on the yuck-brown carpet in my little room, facing the wall, wearing old sweatpants and a stained shirt from my freshmen play—my first in the suburb school, my first play ever.

“Why?” you exclaim in a stage whisper. “When he has to go to Charley and borrow fifty dollars a week and pretend to me that it’s his pay? How long can that go on? How long? You see what I’m sitting here waiting for?”

You try weighing different words and experimenting with your voice shaking, and you aim all that broken passion into the wall.

“How long? … How long? ... How long?”

"Death of a Salesman" is returning to Broadway this week with Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman. The New York Times says that the play is reviving at "the right time."

But the sharp economic downturn that followed the bursting of the housing bubble, and the discovery of the dubious financial practices behind it, casts a revivifying new light on the plight of the Loman family. In both its small details — paying off a mortgage after 25 hard years is a plot point — and its implied questions about the hollowness of some cherished American ideals, the play feels unusually, perhaps unhappily, timely.

It adds:

With employment continuing to lag and millions of homes in foreclosure, there are surely many men and women avoiding the mirror and its accusations, believing, like Willy, that their inability to achieve the golden ideal of financial success is somehow a personal indictment. In the more than half-century since the play opened the compulsion to measure a man’s worth by the size of his paycheck has probably become only more pronounced in American culture.

[...]

The economic collapse — the Great Recession, it has come to be called — has ignited a prickly questioning of these priorities. The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought an intensified focus on the growing inequities in the economy and the dubious practices of the bankers so recently seen as worship-worthy titans, if not oracles. ...

I'm glad to see that these are questions the newspaper isn't content to leave implied, or only asked among the New York audiences that attend the show. So the New York Times is "presenting a series of online discussions and interactive forums on the ArtsBeat blog that will explore the play and its contexts — then and now — with American playwrights, artists involved in the coming production, and readers." See the details here. The conversation has already begun.

It seems that the Great Depression was the formative event in Arthur Miller's life, what he called "the ground upon which I learned to stand.” It makes me wonder who among us is having a similar experience right now: not just watching this international financial upheaval go by, but experiencing it as a fundamental influence on their identity, a first filter for their art. 'Attention must be paid.'

Comments

[Jim]

Bravo