The Terre Haute Chamber of Commerce would like to welcome Theater 7’s Arthur Feinsod as our guest blogger. Theater 7’s production of Death of a Salesman opens June 2.
Production Notes
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
The first full-length play I ever directed was Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, which I directed as a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1970’s. So now, almost half a century later, it feels like a homecoming for me to direct Death of a Salesman. I chose to do it for a number of reasons. First of all, I have taught it for years and have always loved it. Second, I find in this play a work that is as relevant today as it was in 1949 when the play was first performed. And finally, as I imagined how it could be produced on the historic Indiana Theatre stage, I realized it could be presented in such a way that supports a number of the company’s salient principles.
I took my cue for the set from Arthur Miller himself. According to his autobiography, Miller’s original idea was to place the drama on a virtually empty stage, with three platforms: just a few key props floating in blackness. There were to be no walls, not even a house, until the show’s first Broadway designer Jo Mielziner declared, with director Elia Kazan, that “the Salesman needs his house.” Miller not only agreed to that change but embraced it, including the skeletal house and backdrop of encroaching apartment buildings into the stage directions of the published play. But I became intrigued to explore Miller’s original idea because it corresponded with Theater 7’s principle of stage simplicity.
When a stage is simplified, it is vital that everything on it be aesthetically pleasing and visually impactful and to turn this idea into a tangible reality, I sought collaborators who shared my enthusiasm for a “less-is-more” approach. I had admired David Erickson as a visual artist for years and have enjoyed collaborating with David Del Colletti for decades through ISU; they were the ideal artists to realize my plan. I also had great faith in Doug Champion, who was impressive as part of the creative team for Spunk, the company’s first mainstage production. With a cast of fifteen, I wanted someone to design costumes who had a sharp eye and who knew how to be efficient with modest resources; I was overjoyed to recruit Jessica Becker, who has designed clothes for numerous Rose-Hulman and Crossroads Rep productions. Another great find was Marta Shelton for the props; when you reduce the number of onstage objects only to the ones you absolutely need, each one needs to look absolutely right, and Marta filled the bill.
Another distinctive feature is our diverse cast, with my casting choices, giving the Lomans African-American next-door neighbors and, in Act Two, bringing Willy Loman and his sons to celebrate at a jazz club lounge where an African-American performer sings jazz favorites of that era. I did this not only to be true to the company’s first principle, diversity and inclusiveness, but for another important reason as well. The play takes place both in 1949 and in a 1935 of Willy’s memory, in Brooklyn, where my father happened to grow up during this same period. Among the many neighborhoods that my father’s family resided in, one was Bedford Stuyvesant where white Jewish families and African American families lived side by side, though, sadly, probably not with the kind of colorblind comfort and ease that our casting allows us to portray. By representing a world that ignores racism, prejudice, segregation and exclusionary attitudes, we know we are presenting an image of America that should have existed, not one that actually existed in the thirties and forties, but that is for us a determined choice.
Conceptually, I seek to bring Salesman back to another of Arthur Miller’s original intentions. Miller wrote an essay appearing in the New York Times on the eve of the play’s Broadway premiere in which he argues that tragedy is about the victory of the human spirit and is meant to uplift, not depress. Willy Loman, like other revered tragic figures, argues Miller, “is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality” demonstrating “the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.” Not only can Willy himself uplift those watching the play, but so, too, can Linda and Biff, since they too reach courageous realizations by the end, realizations which can inspire. That is what brings this production in line with Theater 7’s fifth principle, that theater should offer uplifting experiences that endorse positive human values. In this play, Miller examines the American Dream, showing how it can, if we are not careful, lead people astray, luring them away from what they truly love and need. The examples Miller offers are telling and instructive; they speak of endurance, individuality and courage, of the need to invest our full humanity as we make life’s choices, and in facing – and hopefully learning from — the consequences. I hope to show what Miller sought when writing Death of a Salesman: that tragedy and its suffering can ignoble by uplifting the spirit.
GENERAL BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The latter half of the 1940s saw an incredible economic and self-confidence boom in America. The end of the Second World War brought a return of prosperity to the country, evidenced by the gross national product’s growth of fifty percent in under a decade. More people were making more money, and they wanted to spend their money. In the 1940s, the sales of automobiles more than quadrupled as cars became a common addition to the American family. More families grew discontented with their small inner-city apartments and moved into the rapidly expanding suburbs, leading to Malvina Reynolds’ song several years later, “Little Boxes,” which satirizes the lifestyle and conformity of America’s middle class. Yet despite the propagated narrative of an American golden age, uneasiness permeated the national unconscious as anxiety about bitter racial divides, the looming specter of Communism, and the social and economic stratification continued to grow. The country was locked in turmoil but still proclaimed the validity of the American Dream.
Arthur Miller joined the growing movement of writers and artists unhappy with the hypocritical stasis of the country. Miller, born in 1915, came to political and artistic consciousness during the 1930s when the Group Theatre dominated the New York theatre culture with its messages of idealism and anti-materialism. Miller says in his autobiography, Timebends, that only Clifford Odets (the most prominent Group Theatre playwright) had been able to create the beauty of European theatre in America. However, by the time Miller began writing, the idealism of the 1930s had been replaced by the consumeristic competitiveness of the 1940s. Miller saw people living their lives not for themselves, but to keep up with their equally materialistic neighbors. This expectation of valuing an individual’s existence based on his relation with others and the societally-driven definition of “success” stood in stark contrast to Miller’s belief in a person’s ability to justify his existence and find meaning for his life on his own terms.
Miller had a message to share but no voice to speak with until he saw Tennessee William’s masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1947, only two years before Death of a Salesman was produced in 1949. Although initially skeptical of the play due to the title he deemed “garishly attention-getting,” Miller’s artistic sensibilities were ultimately inspired by the Willams play. It was because, as he writes in his autobiography, “…Streetcar… had printed a license to speak at full throat, and it strengthened me as I turned to Willy Loman, a salesman always full of words.” After having the first two lines and the play’s ending etched in his mind for weeks on end, Miller finally sat down to write his play, and the first act was completed by the next morning. Williams had given him a voice, and Miller would tune his against that of his fellow playwrights for all the world to hear.
Along with Death of a Salesman, Miller’s theatrical life has been defined by his other works, notably All My Sons (1947), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge (1955 & 1956), and others that have become part of the canon of important American plays, even while his personal life was made public by his interrogation before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his rocky marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe. Miller has continued to live in literary and theatrical renown as the winner of many awards and recognitions like the St. Louis Literary Award, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Lifetime Achievement Award, just to name a few. He spent the last of his 90 years at home on his farm in Connecticut. Miller died on February 10, 2005, on the 56th anniversary of the Death of a Salesman premiere.
