Miller quotations:
1. “In all my plays and books I try to take settings and dramatic situations from life which involves real questions of right and wrong.” (1947)
2. “the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.” (1925) Calvin Coolidge.
3. “in the theater you can sense the reaction of your fellow citizens along with your own reactions. You may learn something about yourself, but sharing it with others brings a certain relief-the feeling that you are not alone; you’re part of the human race.” (The Sunday Times, 3 November 1991.)
4. “I’ve come out of the playwriting tradition which is Greek and Ibsen where the past is the burden of man and it’s got to be placed on the stage so he can grapple with it.” (Arthur Miller and Company.)
5. Miller wrote that Death of a Salesman is based on ..” the concept that nothing in life comes next-everything exists together and at the same time within us….there is no past to be brought forward in a human being…he is in his past at every moment.” Willy “is literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.”
Side facts.
· Dale Carnegie’s bestselling self-help book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was published in 1936 and sold 30 million copies. It draws in part on lessons the author learned working as a salesman for the company Armour.”
· The play opens on a “small, fragile seeming home” which is constructed so that the audience can see simultaneously the kitchen and the two bedrooms and so that the actors can walk through the walls in Willy’s imagined memories. The play is a psychological drama and the audience is invited to see inside Willy’s mind and to try and understand why his only route to success is suicide.
· “The form of Death of a Salesman was an attempt, as much as anything else, to convey the bending of time. There are two or three sorts of time in that play. One is social time; one is psychic time, the way we remember things; and the third is the sense of time created by the play and shared by the audience…..The play is taking place in the Greek unity of 24 hours; and yet it is dealing with material that goes back probably 25 years. And it almost goes forward through Ben, who is dead. So time was an obsession for me at the moment, and I wanted a way of presenting it so that it became the fiber of the play, rather than something that somebody comments about.” (Miller 1985)
· Miller himself said that there are no flashbacks in this play; that Willy himself has destroyed the boundaries between past and present in his “desperation to justify his life”.
· “ the first image that occurred to me….was that of an enormous face, the height of the proscenium arch, which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man's head." (Miller 1957.)
· Indeed, the original title of the play was “The Inside of
His Head.”
The set of the play is then set out to show the objective reality of Willy and what is actually happening. Walls can be seen through to illustrate the “mass of contradictions” in Willy’s mind. Light, sound and set design ALL illustrate this confusion.