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Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman familiarisation notes.

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

Biography. Arthur Miller was born in New York to Austrian Jewish immigrant parents. His father, Isidore, ran a successful business until he lost all his money in the 1929 Wall Street Crash and, as a result, the family was forced to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Miller was exempt from military service on medical grounds and in 1940 he married the first of his three wives, Mary, with whom he had two children, Jane Ellen, born in 1944, and Robert, born in 1947. He subsequently divorced Mary and married and divorced Marilyn Monroe and then married Inge Morath to whom he remained married until her death in 2002. Death Of A Salesman was written in 1948. It previewed at the Locust Street Theater, Philadelphia, in January 1949 before transferring to New York’s Morosco Theater in February where it ran for two years winning Miller the 1949 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is the second of Miller’s four major plays, all of which were written within an eight year period; All My Sons (1947), Death Of A Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View From The Bridge (1955) and it is regarded by many people as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. The plot. The play covers the last two days in the life of Willy Loman, a salesman (the play doesn’t tell us what he sells) suffering from what would now be recognised as Alzheimer’s Disease. Willy is married to Linda and he is father to two adult sons, Biff and Happy. In the course of the play Willy loses his job, his eldest son, Biff, confronts him over his infidelity to Linda with a woman in Boston and at the end Willy commits suicide so that his family can collect the $20,000 payout on his life insurance. Willy’s and his sons’ failure in business is contrasted with Willy’s older brother, Ben, his boss, Howard, his neighbour, Charley and Charley’s son, Bernard, all of whom enjoy the kind of success the Loman’s aspire to but fail to achieve. Themes. Death Of A Salesman is a political play. As Miller says in his autobiography, Timebends, ‘On the play’s opening night a woman who shall not be named was outraged, calling it “a timebomb under American capitalism”; I hoped it was, or at least under the bullshit of capitalism’. Willy works hard, he buys all the advertised brands and he believes that one day he will succeed but in reality he struggles to make a living, the gadgets he buys; the car, the fridge and the vacuum cleaner, constantly break down and he dies out of work and in debt.

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A related theme is urbanisation and the loss of, and need for, a connection with nature. Nothing will grow in Willy’s garden because the buildings block the sun, he dreams of retiring to the country where he can grow his own vegetables and keep chickens and his son, Biff, longs to work outdoors. Above all else, though, the play is about men and masculinity. Willy is one of two sons, he has two sons of his own, Happy and Biff, and his neighbour, Charley, has a son, Bernard, who grows up to have two sons himself. Male characters criticise themselves and each other for being a ‘boy’ and Willy spends the play asking everyone he can find, his brother Ben, his neighbour Charley and Charley’s son Bernard, how to be a man. There are five female characters in the play; Willy’s wife, Linda, a woman in Boston with whom he has an affair, a secretary, Jenny, who has four lines in Act 2, and two young women whom Happy and Biff pick up in a restaurant. Harriet Walter, who played Linda in the 2015 Royal Shakespeare Company production, said in an interview, ‘As a feminist playing those sort of parts… you sort of hope Arthur Miller was more on the feminist side than maybe he was because maybe in his world view there needed to be somebody whose total ambition and self-worth, if you like, even if she wasn’t conscious of it, is tied up with being a good wife and good mother’. Staging. Death Of A Salesman was a radical experiment in form. Miller’s work tends to be seen now as an example of American realism but, as he says in Timebends, by placing the audience inside Willy Loman’s head and moving the action freely between the past and present he rejected the realist stage conventions of the time, ‘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’. Miller admitted in an interview with Richard Eyre that ‘When I wrote the play I couldn’t imagine a set’ and he later told John Lahr in the New Yorker magazine, ‘I was originally gonna call it “Inside Of His Head.” That was at a time when I thought of staging it where the curtain would go up, and you’d see the interior of the skull. And they would be walking around inside of him, all these people’. The stage directions in the published script are a record of the 1949 production and include details added by the director, Elia Kazan, and the emphasis and timing with which the original cast spoke their lines. Miller also describes Jo Mielziner set, Eddie Kook’s lighting and Alex North’s incidental music; as Elia Kazan says in his autobiography, A Life, ‘Art [Miller] rewrote his stage direction for the book based on Jo’s design. A published play is often the record of a collaboration: the director’s stage directions are incorporated, as are some of the contributions of others working on the show – actors’ “business”, designer’s solutions, and so on… actors, designers, directors, technicians “write” the play together’. This production. The play will run for two weeks from 16th to 30th January 2016 in The Ron Barber Studio and there are fifteen performances, including four matinees, so please make sure you’re free for the whole run before you audition. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the play, the auditions or the rehearsal schedule. Andrew Cowie (director) September 2015. adcowie@yahoo.co.uk