Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change

In Willy Loman’s Garden: Contemporary Re-visions of Death of a Salesman

Deborah R. Geis In Willy Loman’s Garden Contemporary Re-visions of Death of a Salesman More than fifty years after its first Broadway production,Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman has become a cultural icon. On one level, the “legacy” of Salesman can be discussed in terms of re-productions or revivals of the work itself, particularly when directorial, design and casting choices allow us to view it from a fresh perspective. For example, the 1998 revival that originated with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and later moved to Broadway was remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the new depth that Elizabeth Franz’s portrayal of Linda Loman gave to a role that has sometimes been dismissed as one-dimensionally supportive and passive.1 Franz allowed us to see—for the first time, at least for this viewer—the quality and scope of Linda’s suffering, particularly as Brian Dennehy’sWilly bullied her in the first part of the play. A second level of discussion of Salesman’s legacy might be the clear influence that it has had upon subsequent works for the American theater . Regardless of whether Sam Shepard intended this to be the case, for example, one can see the father-son tensions set amid the gleaming, unfulfulled promises of the American dream of his Curse of the Starving Class as a hyperreal, bombastic take on the family drama driven by the same energies, the same idealism and despair as Salesman. Perhaps more explicitly, it is difficult to read or watch David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross without making connections between its imagery of salesmanship and that of Miller’s play, particularly in Mamet’s character of Shelly Levene , the failed real-estate salesman who tries desperately to make a comeback in order to rescue his family relationships as well as his own pride.2 AugustWilson’s Fences, too,invites many comparisons to Salesman in its portrayal of Troy Maxson’s vexed relationship with his son Cory and particularly with his long-suffering wife, Rose. 202 What interests me most in this essay, though, is a third level at which we might consider the impact of Salesman upon American literary and dramatic consciousness:its more direct appropriation as intertext for a surprising number of new theatrical works. In other words, rather than simply evoking Miller’s play by some general thematic means, these works export actual characters (or references to actual characters) from Salesman, or they quote,parody or otherwise appropriate Miller’s text in explicit references to it as either “real” or as a literary work with which the characters are familiar.This type of intertextuality creates a more dialogical approach to Miller’s “masterpiece,” one that allows for interrogation and deconstruction of its assumptions about culture and character.While in some sense the appropriation of Salesman is still a type of homage, these works enact critical rereadings of Miller’s play that enable us to review both Salesman and these new texts from a postmodern perspective. Rosalyn Drexler’s 1984 play Room 17C begins, in a sense, before Salesman ends, as Willy has not yet committed suicide; rather, it exists in a kind of parallel universe that allows Drexler to rewrite Miller’s work to her own liking, and even to recombine it with an entirely different literary text. Rosette Lamont describes Drexler’s plays as creating a “semiotics of instability ”in which she“destabilizes the accepted forms of discourse,of the dramatic genre as a whole” (ix). In Room 17C Linda Loman has now taken over Willy’s job as a traveling salesperson and has proven to be far more successful at it than he ever was. Drexler gives her Linda the last name of “Normal” rather than “Loman,” the near-anagram underscoring the complicated trajectories of characters (both here and in Miller’s play) who aspire to “normal”American ideas of success. In her opening stage directions, Drexler shows that although Linda has crossed from the realm of the domestic to the traditionally masculine realm of the wage-earner we should not infer that she has therefore become liberated from the positions that Miller assigned her: Linda has taken over her husband’s destiny to be a successful salesman. Her life is still not her own. Her husband keeps calling to check up on her. She has to harden herself. In some way she still is playing his “masochistic” game. Whatever she does...