NEXT month, a new production, coming from Chicago, of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” will open on Broadway on the 50th anniversary – to the day – of its original premiere. On any short list of great American plays, it is, of course, the story of Willy Loman, who “enters carrying two large sample cases … He is past 60 years of age, dressed quietly.”
Willy’s sad story has always been an enigmatic one: Is his life meant as an indictment of American capitalism? Or is it primarily a psychological portrait of a flawed and driven man? Which is the way to read the play – by the light of Marx or by the light of Freud? There is an evasiveness in Miller that wants to have it both ways. And, up to a point, why not? Good plays have many windows.
There is a third side to “Salesman”: its power as a study of family, of Willy and his wife, Linda, and his sons, Biff and Happy. In the play’s wrenching final scene, called “Requiem,” Willy’s wife wistfully remarks that “he was even finished with the dentist” and Biff declares that “there’s more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made.” A man who is thus remembered by his family is no mere personal failure or social victim.
Of course, Biff goes on to say that Willy “had the wrong dreams” – which seems a political utterance. But then Happy insists that his father “had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have – to come out No.1 man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it.” We feel Miller’s disapproval of Happy’s competitive individualism, but still the boy is going to stay and fight on Willy’s turf. Biff, though, is lighting out for the territory to make a better world.
This tension in the heart of a family between the rooted and the nomadic, between settledness and restlessness, between place and space, is typically American and it’s one of the constituents of “Salesman”s’ greatness. (Where would Sam Shepard be without this theme?) Indeed, Miller has emerged from two recent revivals as, above all, a playwright of family dynamics. Barry Edelstein’s brilliantly moving “All My Sons” (a 1947 play) concentrated more on the father-son electricity than on the old guy’s unforgivably capitalistic misdeeds. Michael Mayer’s exciting “A View from the Bridge” proved to be about not so much the rights and wrongs of informing (this was the political maguffin that dominated discussion of the play back in 1955), as a family coming apart under the pressure of an uncle’s attraction to a niece. Last season’s revival of Miller’s “American Clock” unearthed, amid much second-hand agitprop deriving from Studs Terkel, a wonderful first-hand study of a Brooklyn family during the Depression. And Miller’s 1990 play, “The Ride down Mt. Morgan,” which received its U.S. premiere just a few months ago, proved to be a kind of “Salesman Revisited” – with a more upscale, but no less imperfect businessman (this time called Lyman) at its center.
If family is at the heart of serious American drama, it could be said to start (O’Neill excepted) with Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing!” – a 1935 play wherein an idealistic son emerges from a troubled, failure-ridden family with dreams of “fix[ing] it so life won’t be printed on dollar bills.” He cried at the end that “I swear to God, I’m one week old! I want the whole city to hear it – fresh blood, arms. We got ’em. We’re glad we’re living.”
Looked at today, “Awake and Sing!” moves us less by the political color (a blurry Popular-Front red) of the son’s dreams than by its vivid and idiomatic and very New-Yorky creation of the family that shaped the young dreamer. Exactly 10 years after Odets’ play, Tennessee Williams wrote, in “The Glass Menagerie,” – a work somewhat indebted to Odets – his own great family play. In it a artistic young dreamer leaves a troubled family (“I left Saint Louis”) and attempts to “find in motion what was lost in space.”
What is Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” but a nihilistic parody of a family play? Ever perverse – or let’s say original – Albee wrote his great family play, “Three Tall Women” in the autumn rather than the springtime of his career. Like John Guare’s currently revived “Bosoms and Neglect,” “Three Tall Women” is about a mother and a son, but it’s marked by none of Guare’s wild, hilarious compassion.
O’Neill himself is no exception to the preoccupation of the American stage with the family – from “Bread and Butter,” the unproduced play he wrote in 1914 at the age of 26 that finally got staged last year at New York’s Playwrights Theater, through “Beyond the Horizon” (1920), beautifully revived in 1997, and “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1931) right up to his autobiographical masterpiece “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” which was written in 1940, but staged posthumously in 1956.
Almost all O’Neill’s great works circle around the figure of a budding but tormented young artist/dreamer, struggling to unshackle himself from the coils of society and above all family. And that family often includes not just parents but an ambiguous older brother. This spring, Broadway will be seeing the acclaimed London production of O’Neill’s 1946 “The Iceman Cometh” – a great play set not in the bosom of family but in one of the major American refuges from family – a bar.
While escaping from family is something one can never succeed in doing, wanting to escape is a very American itch. Americans are conditioned (from Jefferson and Emerson onward) to believe that we can invent ourselves totally and freshly. The creation of the self is the American Romantic dream. It is family – both the literal presence of family members and the hidden genetic ties that bind – that qualifies and inflects (but not necessarily destroys) our self-creation. Family much more than society, for it is family that wants to determine and the individual that wants to break free. In the charged polarity between these forces lies the source of much American drama.
