Arthur Miller's Global Theater

Directing Miller in Italy

57 Mariagabriella Cambiaghi Directing Miller in Italy Arthur Miller’s stage history in Italy coincides with two notable events: the widening of national repertoires to include contemporary foreign dramaturgy and the opportunity for a modern way of staging plays in a revitalized theater. After twenty years of fascist dictatorship, which meant the banishment of contemporary foreign works from Italian theaters and the ascendance of repertoires based on light comedy and a few classics, the aftermath of the SecondWorldWar marked the discovery of contemporary foreign, in particular French and American, dramaturgy. To Italian audiences this new momentum had an extraordinarily innovative power: deeply realistic texts, which were often socially relevant, could be performed and less than heroic characters might be displayed in highly charged atmospheres.This broadening of theatrical and cultural horizons found its first interpreters in a generation of directors who were to lay the foundations of contemporary Italian theater, in particular Luigi Squarzina and LuchinoVisconti. As early as 1947, Squarzina staged the new American play All My Sons, directing the highly regarded Maltagliati-Gassman company in a cast that included Evi Maltagliati and a young talent,Vittorio Gassman. The play, first performed at Teatro Quirino in Rome on November 4, 1947, bewildered an Italian audience, one that had been used to receiving a play’s reassuring platitudes. Miller’s work introduced a portrait of America far from the cliché of happy endings familiar from popular Hollywood movies. In addition, the text impressed critics because of the topical interest of its subject and the strict accuracy of language employed by the young and provocative American playwright. However, it was Luchino Visconti who was responsible for Miller’s first success in postwar Italy. Visconti revealed,in his production of Death of a Salesman, the contradictions in the long-celebrated American dream. Performed in Rome exactly two years after its American premiere, the 58 Arthur Miller’sGlobalTheater play opened at the Teatro Eliseo on February 10, 1951, and was triumphally welcomed by both the audience and major critics. Reviewers underlined the careful correspondence between text and staging; such a result was achieved by an extremely innovative use of lighting that split the stage into multiple performance spaces. Gianni Polidori’s design followed Miller’s stage directions,introducing a fixed scene that represented a section of the Loman house as well as its rooms.The background featured reproductions of skyscrapers that insinuated their presence through the open roof of the house, generating a feeling of oppression, as if the house and its inhabitants were constantly in danger of being crushed. The stylistic accuracy of design was mirrored in the way Visconti chose to stress the tragic quality of the play. Paolo Stoppa as Willy and Rina Morelli as Linda uncovered the complexity and intensity of Miller’s dramatic composition.Visconti worked with his actors to search for the intricate and perplexing “interior realism” that could be found in the dramatic text. Commenting on his experience with Death of a Salesman, Visconti pointed out how fundamental this text had been to his work as a director: Directing Death of a Salesman was an important experience to me. . . . it hardly ever happens—along a difficult and adventurous path such as contemporary theater is—to find true and authentic texts such as Miller’s: there you come across everyday life, you hear words people speak everyday in their homes, in the street, everywhere. In Miller’s plays we feel the dramatic sense of American life, the suffocating presence of machines in human existence, exactly because of that extremely detailed fabric of actual facts. This terrible reality speaks by itself: it is enough to detail [it] in all its intensity. That is what I have been trying to do.1 It should come as no surprise, then, that the Italian director would return on several occasions to plays written by the American author with whom he shared similar ideological and artistic values. As early as 1955,Visconti staged The Crucible and showed how a tragedy centered on an ugly episode in American history could also be relevant to Italy by universally symbolizing the violence of power and intolerance.2 The play had already been performed in a French version in 1954 inVenice, directed by Guy Reguier under the title La Chasse aux sorcières.Visconti’s production made clear just how different this play was from Death of a Directing Miller in Italy 59 Salesman...