First, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge to all of my readers (because I know you exist), that I am incredibly bad with self-imposed deadlines. I am also bad with deadlines imposed by others, but not quite as bad and I also have a college degree and a handful of accomplishments to prove that procrastinating never got me into a mess I couldn't get out of.
That being said, now that the show I was working on has closed and I am forced to seek theatrical fulfillment on my now semi-regularly scheduled free time, I anticipate being more dedicated to this project. Now on with my thoughts on Arthur Miller's seminal classic: Death of a Salesman. Going into my read of this play I had a few preconceived notions, and I am pleasantly surprised that I was actually right about a couple of them. Notion 1: The titular salesman would die, likely by suicide. Notion 2: The play would be about a "perfect American family" but actually be about the failures of the American dream/capitalism/patriotism/other quintessentially American things. Notion 3: The salesman's son, Happy, is gay. Is now a bad time to mention that this post will contain spoilers for Death of a Salesman? Because obviously it will. Anyway, I was right about 2/3 of my notions. I was wrong about Notion 3. I'm not sure why I thought Happy would be gay, like in a weird mid-20th century euphemism-y sort of way? Maybe I conflated Death of a Salesman with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another Pulitzer Prize winning, capital G Great American Play? I've actually read that one though... So anyway, Happy's not gay. He is actually described in Miller's stage directions as, "powerfully male" and Miller goes on to say, "Sexuality is like a visible color on him, or a scent that many women have discovered" (Miller, 19).* One of my favorite things about reading old plays is their stage directions. Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, and all the great playwrights of that generation just have this lovely novelistic way of depicting scenery and writing character descriptions that just isn't really in style anymore. Now playwrights say "maybe" and "might" a lot (i.e. "he might sigh here, maybe a song starts to play"). At my school they called that "invitations to collaboration." Then you have Arthur Miller who is like: "[Willy] opens the refrigerator, searches in there, and takes out a bottle of milk. The apartment houses are fading out, and the entire house and surroundings become covered with leaves. Music insinuates itself as the leaves appear" (Miller, 27). Music INSINUATES itself. That's freakin' poetic. OKAY BACK TO THE PLAY STEPHANIE. FOCUS. So obviously my first two notions were correct, because this is an Arthur Miller play so the aging and tragically yet beautifully flawed male protagonist is either going to kill himself after some horrible realization at the hands of their pride-and-joy son (looking at you Joe Keller) or be lead to their death knowingly and with moral resolve (hi John Proctor!) leaving behind a mourning yet stalwart wife (Kate and Elizabeth, my homegirls) as a testament that their life meant something. And Death of a Salesman would be no exception to this rule! I will say Willy Loman's death was less shocking than either of the previously mentioned plays, although The Crucible probably shouldn't be surprising since it's (loosely) based on a true story. That scene at the end of the second act when Elizabeth is called in to bear witness and they ask her if John is a lecher and she denies it and as he's being dragged away to his cell and ultimately his death he yells, "Elizabeth, I have confessed it!" (Miller, 91) always gets me. God, I LOVE dramatic irony. Wow I am really getting tangential tonight. Anyway, as opposed to John Proctor's death, Willy Loman's felt more inevitable. We find out early in the play that he's been attempting to kill himself, or at least contemplating suicide, fairly regularly. It's also literally the title of the play, so, you know. The salesman's gotta die. I believe it was Ibsen that once said "if you put a gun onstage in the first act, it has to go off in the third." And as everyone who has ever met me once said, "Stephanie, you are a pretentious asshole." So onto the third notion. Miller describes the setting of the play as follows: "The action takes place in Willy Loman's house and yard and in various places he visits in the New York and Boston of today" (Miller, 10). One could take this to mean the play takes place in 1949, the year of the play's initial publication and Broadway run. But I read Miller as a little more ballsy than that. And I am going to take a second to acknowledge that ballsy is a gendered term for acceptably male over-confidence but other people call me that sometimes so I'm going to use it freely. What I mean to say is I think Miller is asserting that his play is timeless and universally relevant. And while in some aspects the play is notably dated, such as the scene where Howard Wagner, the young head of the company Willy works for, is showing off his tape recorder, the themes are still obviously resonant. I could imagine a baby-boomer seeing Biff as a whiny and misguided millennial. I don't think that's a very intelligent read on the play, but I can imagine someone making a case for it. Willy and Biff are both products of a broken system (*cough* capitalism *cough*) who were promised certain outcomes from hard work and determination. In Death of a Salesman they are confronted with their realties. Their dreams aren't going to come true, they aren't going to amount to what they thought they could be- what they were expressly told they could be. The American dream, like the salesman, is dead. And on that note I think I'm gonna close out this reflection. Thanks for making it to the end of this post. Next up I will be reading a Tony-nominated, Pulitzer Prize-winning, ~LADY WRITTEN~ play, Look Homeward, Angel by Ketti Frings. *Do people use MLA citations in blogs?
1 Comment
Sarah Pfeffer
10/7/2017 05:03:45 am
As someone who has only read 3 plays (The Importance of Being Earnest, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet #thankshighschool), I'm excited to read about you reading plays since your blog is way more entertaining. Also, my street is named Ibsen so I have some weird pride seeing his name in your blog because besides the fact that he was a Norwegian playwright, I know nothing about him. I think you're referring to Chekhov's gun though (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun).
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Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
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