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6. Jungled Dreams
- The University of Alabama Press
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6 Jungled Dreams You get older, you want to feel that you . . . accomplished something. My only accomplishment is my son. I ain’t brainy. That’s all I accomplished. —Arthur Miller, All My Sons Would Death of a Salesman be regarded as a great play today if Arthur Miller had stuck with the original title of The Inside of His Head? Imagine not designer Jo Mielziner’s skeletal frame of the Loman house dwarfed by a menacing urban landscape, but the playwright’s initial visualization of the play: “an image of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up and we would see the inside of a man’s head. The play’s eye was to revolve from within Willy’s head, sweeping endlessly in all directions like a light on the sea” (qtd. in Gottfried 122). This iconic representation of the workings of a man’s mind sought to give objective form to the subjective experiences of Willy Loman’s last day on Earth. Literal depiction eventually gave way to descriptive irony, but before Death of a Salesman could open at the Morosco Theatre on 10 February 1949, producers tried to convince Miller to name his play either Period of Grace (referring to the grace period of Willy’s life-insurance policy) or, even more emphatically, Free and Clear (a reference to Linda’s last lines during the Requiem). Producers feared that a play with “death” in the title would scare audiences. Backed by his already-famous director, Elia Kazan, Miller held out, and his play opened to immediate acclaim and lasting success. Anyone who grapples with this play today deals with the legacy of the original Mielziner design. The legacy persists not only because of the greatness of this particular designer, the champion of what became known as “selective realism,” but also because the visual image that he created for the play connected deeply with the playwright’s conception. The central image of the play is the man and his house, which he has practically built himself and which stands as an extension of his own being, surrounded by menacing apartment buildings. It remains a personal, family play, a domestic play, but one set within a social and political context. Furthermore, this visual statement gains power as it pervades the entire play. The single visual image dominates a theatrical representation, whereas film and television adaptations, through editing and the versatility of the camera, gen- Jungled Dreams / 79 erally change and vary the visual field. The static resonance of the theatrical image in Death of a Salesman, which achieves some measure of plasticity through the wonders of stage lighting, creates a quite different aesthetic experience from the successful small-screen adaptations of Miller’s great play.1 Miller’s most famous play departs from the well-made formula and Ibsen model of All My Sons (1947), Miller’s previous big commercial success, by breaking up time and space and intermingling past and present in various locations in and around New York and Boston. According to Matthew C. Roudané, “Miller wanted to formulate a dramatic structure that would allow the play textually and theatrically to capture the simultaneity of the human mind as that mind registers outer experience through its own inner subjectivity” (72). Centered on the Loman household, the action shifts to Howard’s office and a restaurant, and it travels to the past with Willy’s memories and recollections. Miller specified in his opening stage directions that in the “present,” actors should act as though the “wall-lines” were really there. However, in scenes from the past, the actors could step through those same “lines” as an indication of a change in time. Lighting and music alterations, scenery shifts, movement to different areas of the stage further aid the audience in following the switch between past and present and give the action the fluidity of a dreamlike experience. For all its novelties of style and performance demands, though, a familiar dramaturgical device drives the plot: the buried secret that comes to light! Biff discovered Willy with another woman in a Boston hotel room during his senior year in high school, and that revelation destroyed the young man’s love for his father and ruined the boy’s life. Prior to presenting the hotel scene, during which Willy’s past adultery is discovered, Miller preps his audience to see the root cause of everything bad. “What happened in Boston...