16 July 1975: Miller, Death of a Salesman
Circle in the Square, New York. Matinee.
Sherlock Holmes. Royal Shakespeare Company (evening; not reviewed here)
An unfair comparison, if these two productions are to be compared at all, since Salesman is so incomparably well acted. Yet, curiously, I came away from this spare, essential Circle in the Square production (advertised as a twenty-fifth anniversary production but off by a year: 1949 + 25 = 1974) saying to myself, What a marvelous theatrical experience. That is what Sherlock Holmes was supposed to be, but wasn’t really.
The other idea in my mind — which I seem to have picked up from Brendan Gill’s review in the New Yorker several weeks ago — is that this production ignores, or perhaps deliberately sets aside, whatever specific or general “social significance” may be found in the text or may have been present for the play’s first audience a quarter-century ago, a time when anyone in the audience, almost, would have known about crank-open windshields on automobiles and known also that they were passé.
Because the fact is that Miller is being as precisely historical as possible, in writing this play, in order to trade on his audience’s sense of a double, or rather a duplicated, time scheme. In its smaller magnitude that scheme shows us Willy Loman’s present inescapably spread out against Willy Loman’s past. The tenacity of that past in its hold on his subjective present represents the force, so to speak, that gives momentum to the play and the impetus to its theme, the fall of a man of no particular account to whom, nevertheless, “attention, attention must finally be paid.” Or, as Linda also puts it, in another phrase made expressly for our mental files by the Ibsen-like craftsman playwright, “Life is only a casting off.” The reference can be construed as utterly personal, a homespun platitude typical of Linda’s habit of desperate rationalization; or as inescapably general, a door onto general philosophical implication. The alternative glimpse of a greater magnitude beyond Willy’s house, garage, and yard, beyond Brooklyn, beyond the New England territory that Miller overheard someone say was never any damn good, is of course one of many in the play. Miller in fact systematically builds into the structure of this Ibsenesque retrospective action a series of “glimpses” that amount to a vista on our common past, the one that Americans hold in common and that can perhaps be indexed well enough by the familiar phrase “the myth of the frontier.”
In the lonely, haunting flute at the beginning of the play with its message of grasses and open sky, in the phantom brother Ben who walked out of the jungle rich — “By God, I was rich” — at twenty-one; in the analogous myth of Dave Singleman, ancient warrior of the asphalt jungle; even in Bernard, the smartest kid in the class who grows up to become a lawyer and argue a case before the Supreme Court, the myth is there. One man against the wilderness, never fightin