Miller’s Undying ‘Salesman’

Arthur Miller toyed with calling his play “The Inside of His Head” and staging it inside an enormous skull. After he decided those notions were “simply pointless” and came up with a new name, the producer tried to talk him out of it--”Death” in the title, the man warned, meant death at the box office.

Yet from the evening of Feb. 10, 1949, when the play opened at the Morosco Theatre and the last eulogies were said over the grave of Willy Loman, and the audience paused in grief and then erupted in applause, “Death of a Salesman” has occupied a special place in the American theater.

“Salesman” burst forth not only as a work of art but as a measure of a country and its people: its economy, families, values and dreams.

Willy Loman, who could no longer sell whatever was in those suitcases he carried on stage, became the symbol of American bluster, false pride and self-deception. Still, everyone’s heart went out to this sagging man who felt so temporary.

Some took it literally and debated the plight of aging salesmen--companies even asked Miller to speak to their road crews. The highbrow crowd on campus, meanwhile, debated whether only the mighty could be tragic figures or whether a common man, like Willy, could join their ranks. Psychoanalysts pondered how the past haunted Willy’s present, and fathers and sons reconsidered their expectations of each other.

Over the years, the play has sunk into the everyday culture by hard measures (11 million copies of the book version sold) and soft ones (quipped about on “Seinfeld”).

A half century after the curtain went up, “Death of a Salesman” still seems to have a grip on the American psyche--even if it is required reading in high school.

The 50th anniversary will arrive with considerable pomp on Wednesday, as a new revival has its official opening night on Broadway, featuring a new score (edgy jazz), a new set (it revolves) and a new Willy (hulking Brian Dennehy).

But the words are the same ones Miller wrote as a young man in a 10-by-12-foot shed he built with his own hands on a knoll in Connecticut. And during the last two weeks, preview audiences have squirmed just like the ones of 1949 as Willy sits across from the son of his old boss, hat in hand, to plead for a break--and the pipsqueak-in-a-suit shines him on, wanting only to get him out of there. Downsizing, they call it these days.

Of course, not every line stings in 1999 like it did in 1949. In an era when credit cards come in the mail, unsolicited, it may be hard for some to understand Willy’s despair at owing a few bucks on his ‘fridge.

Night after night in previews, though, you still hear sobbing in the audience--men sobbing--as Willy embraces his son Biff, who may be a failure, a thief and a “dime a dozen” like his dad, but the boy loves him, he loves him! Minutes later, Willy is dead, his wife, Linda, is sprawled on his grave, and the audience is on its feet, just like ’49.

Whatever it is that “Salesman” is selling, folks still are buying.

Why, then, as acclaim awaits him anew, at 83, is Arthur Miller . . . ambivalent?

An Irish Break From the Spotlight

We find America’s most renowned living playwright in early January with his bags packed. Not Willy’s strapped, stuffed sample carriers, but the modern ones--you yank up the handle and pull them along.

As rehearsals begin a few miles away, at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on 49th Street, Miller is preparing to fly to Ireland. He’s visiting his daughter, Rebecca, and her husband, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and their 7-month-old, Miller’s new grandson. He’s also eager to get away, at least for 10 days, from everyone tugging at his sleeve, wanting him to size up his “Salesman” once more.

“I’m tired,’ he says. “I could spend the rest of my life talking about this.”

Miller offers up that “it’s not my most produced play”--that’s “The Crucible”--and that some don’t view it as his best, either.

It can be unsettling for any artist to have to talk about his work. He does what he does; it speaks for itself. It can be especially difficult when you’re still churning out plays--three in the ‘90s--and they want you to talk about one you wrote 50 years ago.

Two nights earlier, 900 people packed the concert hall at the 92nd Street Y to hear Miller in one of those interviews-on-a-stage: only the playwright and British scholar Christopher Bigsby. The session dealt with Miller’s work since the ‘60s, but when questions were allowed, someone quickly asked about his inspiration for “Salesman.”

In his autobiography, “Timebends,” Miller wrote how he drew from his Uncle Manny, a salesman whose mind--up to the day he killed himself--was drugged by competitiveness, always boasting about the big things in store for his sons, Buddy and Abby. Manny would spout out comments that seemed comical, having nothing to do with what came before. Approached with a simple greeting, he’d reply, “Buddy is doing very well.”

At the Y, Miller gave the short version. “I had a character before I wrote it,” he told that audience. “I just knew that he would die.”

A Play’s Success, and ‘We All Puffed Up’

Elia Kazan, who directed the original “Salesman,” saw a mixed blessing in how Miller connected on so many levels with “Salesman.” “I don’t know any other play . . . that does all these things at the same time,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But Arthur Miller did them all--that one time and never again.”

Kazan noted that life was never the same for the principals in the 1949 triumph, not for him or Lee J. Cobb, the actor who was Willy Loman, or for Miller, most of all. “Truth was soon out of sight,” Kazan wrote. “We all puffed up.”

Miller has himself partly to blame for all the analysis of “Salesman.” Two weeks after it opened, he came out with his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” arguing against the notion that the genre had to involve the fall of a great figure, like a king.

Still, how could he anticipate all the attempts to psych out his character’s name (Loman? Low-Man!) when he actually took it from a 1933 Fritz Lang movie (a young detective, desperate to reach his boss, whispers into a phone, “Hello? Hello! Lohmann? Lohmann!”). Or the exegeses on whether the fountain pen stolen by Biff was a phallic symbol?

“This [New York] psychiatrist . . . came up with a talk. I was curious to see if he could add some psychological insight,” Miller recalls. “All he did is read pieces of scenes. He performed my play!”

According to the Modern Language Assn., the organization of English professors, Miller--or “Salesman”--have been the subject of 413 scholarly books, articles and PhD dissertations since 1963. Salesman has been picked apart by “feminists, universalists . . . social constructionists, Jungians, Marxists . . . ,” says Georgia State University’s Matthew D. Roudane, who edited the association’s guide for teaching what a survey found to be the American play “most studied at the university level.”

The original debate did not envision feminist interpretations of Willy’s marriage, of course. Most everything then revolved around the post-war era’s explosive politics, the brewing Cold War. The day “Salesman” opened, the big news was: 11 Reds on trial in N.Y.; President Truman resists U.N. demands for atomic weapons data.”

One right-wing publication branded “Salesman” a “time bomb expertly placed under the edifice of Americanism.” When Hollywood began preparing a film version, timid studio executives wanted to add a disclaimer saying that salesmen were no longer treated like Willy. To Miller, that was like “urging people to get up out of the theater . . . if ‘Death of a Salesman’ is so outmoded.”

Today, we can see the Miller of 1949 as quite moderate, almost a believer in the system. Yes, Willy indicts the American dream, to the degree he buys into the credo of the conquerors, exemplified by his ghostly brother Ben, “a great man!” In an apparition, Ben reminds Willy that he walked into the jungle at 17, “and when I was 21, I walked out. And by God I was rich!”

Miller’s voice, though, is heard in the neighbor, Charlie, who cautions Willy, “You take it too hard.” When the boss makes promises across the table--there’ll always be a place for you--be wary.

Miller acknowledges that audiences today, despite our overall prosperity, have fewer illusions about their jobs--and exhibit less loyalty in return. Aren’t the young now instructed that they will have several careers? But look where that leaves them.

“Any Monday morning you can be told you are no longer needed, the company is moving to Guatemala. This is something that goes very deep down. In a very primitive way, you just can’t tell somebody to just get lost.” He quotes Willy: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away--a man is not a piece of fruit!”

Miller Undertook Penance of Labor

Miller hardly dislikes money. He recently replaced his longtime Connecticut country place with a 400-acre upgrade and stands to make a mint from the new Broadway run. He figures that if he wrote the stuff, “Why not me?”

But he’s still the man who was made so uneasy by his first success, with 1947’s “All My Sons,” that he signed up to do manual labor; and he remembers well the opening of “Salesman,” when the owner of the theater gave a white-tablecloth feast for his tuxedoed friends--not for the creative crew--right on the famous set depicting the Lomans’ bare-bones Brooklyn home. The “pain and love and protest in my play,” he wrote later, were “transformed into mere champagne.”

A product of the New York streets himself, he still feels a need to mix with “those on the bottom.” In January, before he packed his bags, Miller went to an East Harlem settlement house to assist a literacy program that teaches new immigrants English using literature.

“Their need is right on the skin, these people,” he said. “I don’t mean their financial need--their need to understand what you’re saying. What are you up to? Are you with me or against me? Can I lean on you or are you going to bite me? They’re listening that way. I like that.”

He, too, feels a bit like an outsider. How many in his position still relish, like Willy, working with their hands, in his case with wood? Miller recently finished the unpainted coffee table in his apartment’s sparse living room. Though there’s a small TV on the far wall, he can hardly watch the nonsense that “disperses itself into the room, under the rug, into the furniture.” Movies? Look how Americans embraced that feel-good “Forrest Gump.” He hated it.

“He’s always triumphant,” Miller says of the Oscar-winning Tom Hanks character. People today “want to participate in a victory. They don’t want to participate in a defeat. Which is interesting, my saying that in view of ‘Death of a Salesman.’ ”

He knows the time has passed since audiences--American ones, at least--looked at the serious theater as their great shared experience. Only splashy musicals now fill enough seats to meet the bottom line on Broadway.

Miller’s “Broken Glass” got mixed reviews here in 1994, and the play--set in 1938 and dealing with anti-Semitism--ran only two months on Broadway. Then it opened in London, at the National Theatre and, boom--box office and renown, Britain’s Laurence Olivier Award. The National Theatre stages more plays by Miller than any other playwright except Shakespeare. “They have a theater,” is how Miller puts it. “We have show business.”

“In America, he tends to get treated like a Smithsonian Institution figure. ‘Oh, is he still around?’ ” says Bigsby, the English scholar, who heads the Arthur Miller Centre--which focuses on American studies--at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. “Or else, it’s Marilyn [Monroe]. He’s been married to Inge [photographer Inge Morath] since 1962, and he still gets asked about the marriage to Marilyn.”

Seeing How His Drama Is Produced

That old bout with celebrity frenzy may be one reason Miller craves his privacy. But he seems reluctant, as well, to see what happens to his works--few productions produce the music he hears with his own ears. One group did “Salesman” with a car on the stage facing the audience, shining its brights at them. He laughs now at that inane bid to be different, then observes, “You have to face the fact that when you’re dead, they’ll do whatever they want with your plays.”

The front foyer of his apartment is decorated with posters advertising his plays all over the globe. “Salesman” has been done from Scandinavia to Communist China, where the audience had no concept of salesmanship but identified with Willy’s frenzy to leave a thumbprint on the world. “We also want to be No. 1,” one man said on opening night.

Miller sees that part of the magic of “Salesman” is how audiences view Willy, and the play, their own way. People his age, for instance, tend to connect with “the part that deals with his disorientation.”

“I tend to side with Willy more and more,” he says. “With his devotion. I think I understood it when I wrote it, but I wasn’t taking sides. Now I am.”

Forget the politics. These days he views “Salesman” as “basically a love story.”

“Everyone loves Willy,” Miller explains, “except Willy doesn’t realize it.”

A tragedy, indeed. One that begs a question as it’s time to leave: When the anniversary arrives, will Miller be ready to accept love, namely America’s love for the play that he didn’t so much write 50 years ago but, as Kazan put it, “released.”

A Setting That Whirls and Blurs

From the first moment, you’re told this is a new production. The original’s haunting flute music is replaced by the jarring noise of traffic, then the first chords of a Richard Woodbury jazz score. The legendary “reality-condensation” set of Jo Mielziner--with its 6-foot bedroom, tiny kitchen table and lone appliance, the ‘fridge--is replaced by platforms and boxcars and a turntable and moving sidewalks. They allow others in his life, and his memory, to literally come to Willy or revolve around him in a near-dizzying blur of past and present, reality and fantasy. We’re back, in a sense, to Miller’s original concept, “The Inside of His Head.”

The production isn’t ignoring the social comment but takes pains to avoid one trap of “Salesman,” which is to beg for pity. There’s none of that in Dennehy’s Willy Loman--no sense that he’s hopelessly weighted down with those bags when he arrives home, having been unable to make it past Yonkers.

Dennehy follows quite a lineup of Willies: Cobb on stage and in a TV version in the ‘60s, Fredric March in the film, George C. Scott in the ‘70s and Dustin Hoffman in the last Broadway production, in 1984.

Uncle Manny, the inspiration for Willy, was a small man, like Hoffman. But the burly Cobb convinced Miller that it was done best as a big man’s part, like Lear. Dennehy, 60, a former Columbia University football lineman, sets a new standard in that regard, though he only once rises to full size, like a grizzly--to bellow from the front of the stage, “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman . . . .”

This is Dennehy’s fourth partnership with director Robert Falls, 44, the artistic head of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, which worked up this “Salesman” in the fall. After one of the first previews, a Saturday matinee, they walk across 49th Street from the O’Neill Theatre to gulp down dinner before the evening show and to talk about, among other things, their fathers.

Falls goes first: “While I was working on this play, my father”--in his 70s--”had a little car accident. He had no idea how it happened. He just was going the wrong way at the wrong time and got broadsided. It shook him to the core, and he had this tremendous fear and anger in him that I had never seen. In his eyes. And that look, I knew, was Willy Loman coming in the door. How did this happen to me? How did I get old? He’s not going gently into that night.”

Dennehy, drained from the matinee, gulps down water. Willy and son Biff are always fighting, he notes, but when Biff heads off, “all of a sudden Willy says [to his wife], ‘Remember that Ebbets Field game?’ “--the city football championship, at which Biff was the star--”It’s when he leaves the room that Willy expresses his love.” The actor then says: “My father and I would fight all the time--and his friends would say, ‘But you really ought to hear how your father talks about you.’ And I’m saying to myself, ‘Why doesn’t he say it to me?’ ”

Dennehy says that when he’s on stage and collapses in his son’s arms, he looks into the audience at the men, crying. “I got to tell you there are 50 people out there living their own lives. It has nothing to do with us--it’s them.”

‘A Little Bit of Dust Over 50 Years’

That’s how it goes, even in 1999. Sure, “Salesman” may have “accumulated a little bit of dust over 50 years,” Falls says. That’s why he wanted to stop paying homage to the original look and “rethink the piece as if I was handed the manuscript for the very first time, doing a new play by a young writer named Arthur Miller.”

It’s an 83-year-old Miller, though, back from Ireland, who is coming to see their evening show.

“I do hope he’s ready to accept what’s going to happen,” Dennehy says. “You know, the ‘Thanks.’ ‘Congratulations.’ ‘We appreciate it.’ I hope he’s ready to have that peace. There’s always the problem of people thinking it’s all over--and he shouldn’t think that way. But at the same time, there’s no reason he can’t say, ‘You know, you’re right. I did a hell of a job.’ ”

They’re planning panels and parties and other festivities around the Wednesday anniversary.

The Saturday night preview gave Miller a dose of what will unfold. Outside the theater, a “gang”--that’s what he called it--spotted him leaving and surrounded him. Translation? A hundred theatergoers would not stop applauding until he drove off.

He had notes, naturally, to give to Falls in the morning. The first act needed a little work. Biff needed some more arc.

But overall? He loved it. The last 10 minutes? Perfect. Everything about Dennehy’s Willy. And Elizabeth Franz as Linda, playing the woman as angry, fighting for Willy’s dignity. The sets and music too. Miller once thought “Salesman” was riveted to the original look. “This is a revelation,” he said. “I learned one thing: Thank God, there is more than one viable way to do this play.”

The way the audience was riveted? It didn’t seem like nostalgia to him.

He still wasn’t sure about the fuss outside the theater. “The producer had the car waiting, thank God. We could get out of there.”

On Wednesday, when they are certain to drag him on stage?

“I have strong teeth, and I’ll grit it out. At the same time, I’d just as soon stay home.”

But he won’t.

“I suppose they’ll do it, and I suppose they’ll get me up, and I suppose I’ll put up with it. And I suppose,” Arthur Miller confesses, “I’ll enjoy it.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

‘Attention Must be Paid . . . ‘

“Death of a Salesman” produced many of the most quoted lines from 20th century theater.

CLASSIC LINES

“He’s liked, but he’s not well liked.”

--Willy and Biff

****

“I couldn’t get past Yonkers today. . . . The woods are burning!”

--Willy

****

“Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. . . . But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. . . . Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

--Linda

****

“He died the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers in the smoker of the New York, New Haven & Hartford, going into Boston. . . .”

--Willy

****

“There were promises made across this desk. . . . You can’t eat the orange and throw away the peel--a man is not a piece of fruit!”

--Willy

****

“Funny, y’know? After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”

--Willy

****

“I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ashcan like all the rest of them! I’m one dollar an hour, Willy!”

--Biff

****

“Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give your medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back--that’s an earthquake. . . . A salesman has got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

--Charlie

****

THE EARLY REVIEWS

“Death of a Salesman” was generally acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, and Arthur Miller was awarded the 1949 Pulitzer Prize. But not everyone saw it as a classic. Some samples of the original reviews:

“Mr. Kazan may produce as brilliantly as he likes; he may bring out every device of lighting, grouping, stylising, timing and designing to evoke the play’s moods. But none of them is an adequate substitute for the words which just aren’t there.

--T.C. Worsley, New Statesman & Nation

****

“Here’s my true report that, yesterday at the Morosco, the first-night congregation made no effort to leave the theatre at the final curtain-fall. . . . For a period somewhat shorter than it seemed, an expectant silence hung over the crowded auditorium. Then, believe me, tumultuous appreciation shattered the hushed expectancy. . . . It was, and will remain, one of the lasting rewards that I, as a professional theatregoer, have received in a long life. . . . “

--Robert Garland in The New York Journal-American

****

“Arthur Miller has written a superb drama. From every point of view, ‘Death of a Salesman’ . . . is rich and memorable. It is so simple in style, and so inevitable in theme, that it scarcely seems like a thing that has been written and acted. For Mr. Miller has looked with compassion into the hearts of some ordinary Americans and quietly transferred their hope and anguish to the theatre.”

--Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Source: The Viking Critical Library’s “Death of a Salesman, Text and Criticism,” edited by Gerald Weales