“This is why we go to live theatre.”
I spoke these words to my wife as we stood blinking in the sunlight in front of the Avon Theatre, with the thunderous ovations for the cast and crew of the Stratford Festival’s Salesman in China still echoing in our ears.
For this superb show boasts it all: a captivating premise, an exceptional script, deft direction and staging, exceptional acting performances in not one, but two languages – and a surprising, revelatory relevance. And these elements combine to deliver an utterly unique and thoroughly transcendent theatrical experience.
An unlikely show about an unlikely show
By now, the show’s premise is well-known. In 1983, China was re-emerging from its protracted Cultural Revolution onto the world stage. As the country engaged warily with the United States, American playwright Arthur Miller (Tom McCamus) – by then, three decades removed from publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork Death of a Salesman – travelled to Beijing to direct a Chinese production of the play.
Miller’s principal partner in this odd endeavour was legendary Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng (Adrian Pang). Still fresh from a 13-year imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution, he had translated the play, and would play Death’s principal Willy Loman.
On the surface, Death of a Salemsan – centered around a suicide fuelled by hopes and failures defined by American materialism – seems an implausible cross-cultural collaboration. How could the play even be understood by, let alone forge a cultural bridge with, the then-insular and non-materialistic Chinese?
Yet thanks to the efforts of Ruocheng and Miller, it became a much-lauded success, running for more than 50 performances. Salesman in China, written by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy, who also brilliantly directs the show, explores how this triumph was achieved. It draws upon retellings of the story by Ruocheng and by Miller, and supplements this material with extensive research and fieldwork, in order to widen the play’s focus from just the two principals and their family to the other actors, the workers who mounted the production, and the broader families of Ruochheng and Miller – in particular, their sons and fathers, both absent and present.
Salesman in China – which seems at least as audacious and far-fetched in premise as that 1983 production – is the story of Ruocheng’s central role and Miller’s supporting role in creating the show and guiding it to its first performance. It feels certain to eclipse the number of performances mounted — starting the count here at Stratford, then continuing in a no-brainer pickup and move to a Toronto theatre company.
On the surface, this is surprising. A play about the production of another play risks being a little too “inside baseball”: an inaccessible exercise in self-referentiality. But part of the special genius of Salesman in China is that knowledge of Miller’s work deepens the thematic resonance . . . but limited knowledge of the play may enable more active participation in the act of alchemy that is the production’s crowning achievement.
From the historical to the eternal
That alchemy might be more accurately described as transubstantiation – by which this company of actors and production team conjure the fraught moment in history of this act of theatrical exchange. . . and broaden and deepen it.
First, Sy’s direction startles us out of our theatrical complacency with unexpected and delightful Chinese cultural elements – the bicycles which roar by unexpectedly, and a slyly accessible-yet-inaccessible performance after intermission. And some of the play’s funniest scenes feature the Chinese actors’ ingenuous interrogation of the text and premise of Death of a Salesman.
The cast are uniformly outstanding – in both languages. An electric Pang embodies Ying Ruocheng as a tortured family man in the crucible of history, as intense and contradictory pressures – embodied in a series of exceptional acting performances – are brought to bear on his work.
Political pressures take the form of Cao Yu (Derek Kwan in one of several sparkling roles) who is the artistic director of the People’s Art Theatre and a vehicle for the government to test the distance between Ruocheng’s art and loyalty to the Republic. Familial pressures take the form of Jo Chim’s Wu Shiliang, his cool, clear-eyed and critical wife, who wants him to be more assertive yet more politically circumspect. And personal pressures manifest in the fraught father-and-son relationships (and suitcases) shared by Ruocheng both with Miller and with Willy Loman, the principal character in Death of a Salesman.
Finally, artistic pressures take two forms. The first is the likeably blinkered, plain-speaking Arthur Miller – whose complex combination of insecurity, ambition, theatrical insight and cultural blindness Tom McCamus simply disappears into.
Miller has plenty to learn – from his self-sufficient, capable wife Inge Morath (Sarah Orenstein) and from Ruocheng and the company of Chinese actors.
The second is the company of actors, who look to Ruocheng with incisive, insightful (and sometimes hilarious) questions about the play’s meaning and relevance. Agnes Tong is touching as Liu Jun – a young actor who feels at first like incidental comic relief, but who navigates culturally challenging terrain to deliver a foundational plank in the bridge this production is building. Howard Dai’s deadpan production manager is the hilarious face of incongruous Chinese norms, whom we come to understand as more than a stereotype. An earnest Steven Hao conjures actor Li Shilong, who plays Biff with energy and intensity; and Phoebe Hu moves us as Zhu Lin, the actor working to understand and play Linda, Willy Loman’s wife.
Building and being a bridge
Pang’s Ruocheng describes his role as a bridge between cultures. And at the nexus of these relentless and simultaneous pressures, we watch him undertake the monumental and personally costly act of bridge-building. That act is visualized first by Joanna Yu’s brilliant set design. It elevates the stage, in order to allow audiences to see the continuous Mandarin and English subtitles projected not above, but below the actors. Language is the foundation of culture and point of view. Omnipresent, it shapes and filters what we see – so the story of this cross-cultural production plays out literally on top of the two languages being spoken.
Ruocheng is almost continuously astride that bridge, which shifts continuously back and forth. He is equal parts a human connector-translator and a tortured hero battling personal demons as he strives to bridge America and China, Miller and the theatre company, his family and his art. They pepper him with demands for explanations, answers, concessions, and the way forward. And he makes choice after difficult choice: about what to communicate and what to hold back, and whether to deploy his stratagem with humour, candour, circumspection, or outright misdirection.
Ruocheng is facilitating a master class in connection through sheer creativity and will; and Pang’s vulnerable performance conveys brilliantly the physical effort, the emotional investment, and the psychic cost of playing that role. It’s hard as hell to understand, appreciate and take respectful and appropriate action in a bi-cultural context – especially when it’s under a spotlight. And in his tortured face, despairing dreams, and difficult gambits – which are supported superbly by Sophie Tang’s lighting design and Alesandro Juliani’s sound design – we see the heavy price that he pays for it.
But as the other characters come to stand with him on the tenuous and beautiful bridge he is building, we see the fruits of his herculean efforts. The actors, his family, Miller and his family, and the Chinese people working on and watching the show – all learn and grow. And they give back to him, in spades.
“Where are we?”
One of the central questions the Chinese cast pose to Miller as they grapple with Death of a Salesman’s cross-cultural implications is how to situate themselves. They ask literally, “Where are we?” — and this feels like a question that is aimed at us in the audience.
The answer? We’re right there with them atop that bridge.
We’re experiencing an initially delicate, but shimmeringly strong story of fathers and sons, families, nations and creators.
We’re appreciating how meaningful creation occurs at the nexus of the personal, the cultural, the commercial, and the artistic. How it’s an act of struggle and an act of connection built atop the limiter and enabler that is language. How it’s messy and difficult, but fantastically rewarding.
And we’re adding the weight of 2024 – this time of elevated Asian hate and fraught relations with China – to that slender structure assembled.
And through it all, in one shining moment, we’re touching the eternal.
Yes, this is why we go to live theatre.
Salesman in China is on stage at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre until October 28, 2024. Visit stratfordfestival.ca to reserve tickets.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine 2024
