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by Leanna Brodie & Jovanni Sy, directed by Jovanni Sy

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

August 23-October 26, 2024

Miller: “It’s about fathers and sons”

Salesman in China is an epic work about the importance of contact between different cultures. Its subject is the first-ever performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) in China in 1983. Jovanni Sy directs with cinematic fluidity and the production is studded with powerful performances. The physical set-up of the production may not be ideal, but the play’s depiction of the benefits of intercultural exchange, difficult as they may be at first, is one that has become of vital urgency in the present.

China is just starting to open up after the ten years of the repressive Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Deng Xiaoping had been the leader of the People’s Republic of China since 1978 after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. During the Cultural Revolution only the so-called Eight Model Operas were allowed to be performed, new works that depicted China’s struggles against foreign and class enemies. Now in 1983, the great Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng (1929-2003) thinks the time is ripe for the Beijing People’s Art Theatre to present what in his view is the greatest work by the greatest living American playwright.

Ying has invited Miller to direct his own play. Salesman in China follows the rocky course of the play from the Chinese company’s first meeting with Miller and his wife Inge Morath through six weeks of rehearsals up to the triumphant premiere of the production. The playwrights Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy state that the play is “suggested by” the memoirs of Miller and Ying – Miller’s Death of a Salesman in Beijing (1984), based on his diary during the rehearsal period, and Ying’s Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform (2008).

The rehearsal process is best with difficulties. First, there are the cultural difference between the US and China. China does not have travelling salesmen or life insurance and the Chinese actors are not familiar with private automobiles or football. Miller begins right at the start by telling the actors to forget everything they may have heard about the play being about the American Dream. Instead, he says the play is about “fathers and sons”. In the end, this is the theme the actors hold on to. This is also the theme that Brodie and Sy use to unify their play. The scene we see the actors rehearse most often is Biff’s attempt to convince Willy that men like them “are a dime a dozen” and to persuade Willy to let go of his unrealistic expectations.

As Ying grows to understand the role of Willy Loman which he will play, he begins to recall his own disillusionment with his father who left the family in China to work at the Catholic University in Taiwan that his grandfather had founded. Increasingly, Ying sees the image of his father in the mirror and feels his father looks down on his vocation as an actor. Miller, seeing that something about the play is distressing Ying, tells him that he still feels guilty about abandoning one of his two sons, a child with Down Syndrome, to live out his life in an institution.

Meanwhile, there are warnings from Communist Party officials that Ying’s project must be a success. If it is not, the theatre could be shut down and Ying and his wife imprisoned for embarrassing the country. At the same time, Ying and his wife are expected by the party to report on the activities of Miller and Inge.

One central question raised repeatedly by the actor who will play Linda Loman, is “Where are we?” She wonders if they are supposed to be Chinese people living in America. After much delay, Miller finally states that the play takes place in “the country of the mind”. The Chinese designers had been upset that Miller forbade them to put the actors in whiteface and give them nose prosthetics. Ying defends the practice as “our tradition” of portraying White people, but Miller’s view wins out. It’s good of Brodie and Sy to show that Europeans are not the people who employed ethnic stereotypes.

The action takes primarily in the Beijing rehearsal room that Chimerik’s projections and Sophie Tang’s wide range of lighting effects transform into other places in Beijing in 1983 or into Ying’s memories of the past. Fang Zhang has translated about a third of Brodie and Sy’s text into Mandarin, used when the Chinese characters speak to each other.

For a new play Salesman in China has an unusually large cast, 20 actors in all, most of whom have to speak both Mandarin and English. Such a large cast is not really necessary, but Sy as director uses many of actors as supernumeraries to give life to the stage. It’s exciting to see an example of the Eight Model Operas, namely The Red Detachment of Women (1964), to give a sense of the only kind of theatre was permitted during the Cultural Revolution. But the same scene is an integral part of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China (1987), about an earlier attempt at a US-China rapprochement, making one wonder if there is no other scene that could be referenced.

While Brodie and Sy seem to conceive of Ying and Miller as dual protagonists, it is Ying to comes off as the figure who has the most to lose both socially and psychologically should the production fail. To play such a complex role as Ying Ruocheng, the Stratford Festival has hired Singaporean actor and presenter Adrian Pang 彭耀順. Pang gives a magnificent performance. He portrays a man who is used to channeling anger and stress into his acting. But, as Pang shows so well, as Ying’s stress increases approaching opening night, as Ying’s father appears more frequently, Ying begins losing his grip on himself. Salesman in China is worth seeing if only to experience Pang’s performance.

In contrast, the Arthur Miller of Tom McCamus comes off as a curmudgeon easily irritated by the challenges he faces. Part of Miller’s problem, not really made clear enough in the play, is that Miller is a writer not a director. Ying has invited Miller to direct for the prestige it will give the production. That, plus the cultural differences between Miller’s expectations and Chinese traditions lead to his frequent exasperation. Fortunately, McCamus knows how to vary Miller’s frustration and how to make Miller’s outbursts increase in violence until they reach a head when Miller learns that China has expected Ying to keep tabs on Miller.

The play thus presents us with two uncompromising males who do want to be friends despite all their differences. Brodie and Sy present the wives of both Miller and Ying as steadying influences on their husbands. The result is that we don’t really see that Inge Morath and Wu Shilang are important people in their own right. In the play Miller’s wife Morath comes off as simply an avid tourist who like to take photos. Brodie and Sy give us no clue that Morath was a highly acclaimed professional photographer who held numerous exhibitions of her work and published a huge number of monographs. As for Ying’s wife Wu, she was a leading actor and important translator of English plays into Chinese, including Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which was one of her favourite plays. In the play Brodie and Sy show her as the one person who her husband trusts, but we learn nothing of her other accomplishments.

Given these constraints, Sarah Orenstein and Jo Chim 詹翠珊 try to make their characters as rounded as they can. Though Orenstein makes clear that Morath is the only one who knows how to calm her husband’s anger, she can’t control the fact that Brodie and Sy are willing to make Morath a comic figure who has immersed herself in Chinese history and art and learned Chinese before the trip. Rather than giving Morath any credit for her preparation, Brodie and Sy have Morath appear pedantic and foolish since no one can understand her Chinese. Jo Chim presents Wu Shiliang as highly intelligent but manipulative and suspicious, always chiding her husband for not standing up to Miller. Yet, when Ying is in distress, Wu, like Morath, is the only one who knows how to comfort him.

Of the rest of the huge cast, two stand out. One is Steven Hao 郝邦宇 who plays Biff in Salesman. The other is Phoebe Hu 胡馨勻 who plays Linda Loman. Hao plays Biff with such passion in the “dime a dozen” scene that we don’t need to read the English subtitles to know what he is saying. Hu is excellent as an experienced actor who with unwavering calmness will not let Miller’s reputation and bravado keep her from asking essential questions about the production that he seems unwilling to answer, most notably the question, “Where are we?”

Director Jovanni Sy and his cast beautifully manage the fluid changes of scene and shifts between languages. The main impediment to enjoying the play as fully as one might wish is a physical one. Joanna Yu set has placed all the action on a platform about one metre above the stage floor. The platform’s height must certainly cut off the view of the action for those in the first row. The programme claims that “This play is presented in English and Mandarin with surtitles”, but that is not true. Spoken English is titled in Mandarin and Mandarin in English, but the titles are not surtitles but subtitles projected onto the face of the platform. The play does use surtitles on a screen above the stage, but only to announce changes of time and location. The problem with having the dialogue projected so low in the stage picture is that some audience member’s heads block the words from the view of others. The platform is unnecessary and a larger screen above the stage could easily have been used both for dialogue and scene setting.

Salesman in China is certainly one of the most discussed plays currently on stage in Stratford. I happened to overhear many conversations about the play during a week in Stratford, and in all of them people complained about their inability to read the subtitles. Many people who planned to see the play again suggested that sitting in the balcony might make reading the titles easier.

What is more essential, though, is that Salesman in China makes a point that used to be commonly understood but has recently become discounted. The current, much-touted view is that people of an ethnic group are the only ones who can understand that group and that group’s art. Brodie and Sy’s play shows just the reverse. The Chinese cast and the Chinese audiences that made Miller’s play such a success in China understand the play despite their cultural differences. Brodie and Sy suggest that works of art reflect a common humanity to which people from any background have access.

Today our view of the events of 1983 is tinged with nostalgia. It was a time when people of different backgrounds at least conceived of the idea that bridging the gap between them was a good thing. Now, with China attempting to Sinicize people who are not Chinese and with the US longing to retreat from the world stage, things are quite different. Brodie and Sy’s play should bring us hope that subsuming other cultures or standing aloof from are not the only ways different cultures can treat each other. If bridging the gap was possible in the past, it also should be possible in the future.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Jo Chim as Wu Shiliang, Sarah Orenstein as Inge Morath, Tom McCamus as Arthur Miller and Adrian Pang as Ying Ruocheng; Adrian Pang as Ying Ruocheng (top of stairs) playing Willy Loman with ensemble; Adrian Pang as Ying Ruocheng (top of stairs) playing Willy Loman; Adrian Pang as Ying Ruocheng and Tom McCamus as Arthur Miller. © 2024 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca.