Word: salesman
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...speaks from heartening experience. It has been claimed that not a night passes without Salesman being performed somewhere in the world, usually with success, mostly in venues where no one can possibly conceive of what America was like in 1949. For example, Miller's remarks about Willy's combative relationship with reality were contained in his advice to the players he directed last May in China (an experience he has wryly, and wisely, recounted hi Salesman in Beijing, which the Viking Press will publish next month). To them he also insisted "the one red line connecting everyone...
...performance is, it does not dominate or distort Miller's vision. In fact, it frees it from the limits imposed by critics of the original production, who tended to see Willy's fate determined almost solely by capitalist economics, and by later commentators who wondered whether the salesman could be regarded as a truly tragic figure, since he was not observed to fall from the great heights demanded of such characters by the laws of Aristotelian aesthetics. From the beginning, Miller told TIME Reporter Elaine Dutka, he had seen the play as two seemingly different entities...
...performance in its way as awesome as Hoffman's; the sons who are Willy bifurcated, with Biff (John Malkovich) inheriting the dreaming genes, Happy (Stephen Lang) the gift of delusory gab, but with both lacking their father's annealing fire. Miller has said that at its heart Salesman is "a love story between a man and his son, and in a crazy way between both of them and America." As the wounded party in that triangle, Malkovich gives a subtly textured performance in which anguished puzzlement never gives way to self-pity. In that sense, at least...
...traditional arguments about Salesman is whether its diction is failed lyricism or failed realism. But it is neither: its first director, Elia Kazan, says it is written "just off the real." Miller's people are first-and second-generation Americans who have yet to achieve a perfect-pitch imitation of standard American brag, bluff and bluster; their language is thus a precise and moving metaphorical expression of the uneasiness with which they live in the American dream they have not quite assimilated. By touching this language with the accents of Brooklyn's old ethnic neighborhoods, this company simultaneously...
...well, the wild humor ("I laughed a lot when I wrote the play") that was also integral to Miller's first imaginings, yet was somehow lost to memory and lost on revivalists, who have mistaken glum sobriety for high seriousness. On the night of Feb. 10, 1949, when Salesman opened on Broadway the first time, Arthur Kennedy, the original Biff, recalls wandering around in a daze between acts, encountering Miller, and asking him how he thought the play was going. "The issue is not in doubt," the playwright firmly replied; and now it seems even the last pockets...