![]() ![]() ![]() Miller, though an admirer of Ibsenite realism, was avowedly inspired by A Streetcar Named Desire, with its techniques for entering the heroine’s disordered consciousness. The second reason for Salesman’s success is its formal audacity and intricacy, which can both dazzle the playgoer and reward the student’s scrutiny. Yet I suspect it worked because a sufficiently intense and intelligent actor can lend Willy a gravity that, as I’ll explain, isn’t there in the script. The late Bingo O’Malley played Willy Loman in a heroic, athletic performance that is still the best thing I’ve ever seen on a stage, and I promise you that among us jaded, philistine high-school students there was not a dry eye in the house. While I’m not a great theater-goer, I will never forget the matinee I attended on a school field-trip in spring of 1999 to the City Theatre on Pittsburgh’s South Side. So I will begin with two reasons that Miller’s tragedy of the common man has held the global stage, as well as readers’, critics’, and scholars’ attention, since 1949.įirst, it can be extremely effective in performance. I don’t think this play works, but I also distrust the classics-hating canon-smashing puritan iconoclast impulse, as if it were not rashly arrogant to assume a work that’s circulated widely in time and space beyond its own circumstances has nothing to offer. Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism by Arthur Miller ![]()
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