The Inside of His Head?

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The Inside of His Head?
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A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is
small and fine, telling of grass and trees and
the horizon. The curtain rises. Before us is
the Salesmans house. We are aware of towering,
angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all
sides. Only the blue light of the sky falls upon
the house and forestage the surrounding area
shows an angry glow of orange. As more light
appears we see a solid vault of apartment houses
around the small, fragile-seeming home. An air of
the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out
of reality. The kitchen at center seems actual
enough, for there is a kitchen table with three
chairs, and a refrigerator. But no other fixtures
are seen. At the back of the kitchen there is a
draped entrance, which leads to the living-room.
To the right of the kitchen, on a level raised
two feet, is a bedroom furnished only with a
brass bedstead and a straight chair. On a shelf
over the bed a silver athletic trophy stands. A
window opens on to the apartment house at the
side.
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Miller's Theaterthe forms of modern drama

• Dr. Tonya HoweMarymount University
• March 2012

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What form should a modern American tragedy take?
I sought a form, in Death of a Salesman, that
could reflect what I had always sensed as the
unbroken tissue that was man and society, a
single unit rather than two. --Miller,
Timebends An Autobiography (182)
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Realism and
Naturalism
Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian, 1828-1906, father of
modern drama) Brought politically and socially
unsafe subjects, like alcoholism, the
hypocrisies of Victorian society, class struggle,
into the theater. Realism is characterized by
intense detail, scientific observation. Aesthetic
s/Style correlates with politics.
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Realism and
Naturalism
Realism and naturalism (slightly different
movements, but realism is used to describe the
basic scenic approach, where naturalism is used
to describe a political sensibility) Darwin's
evolutionary theories astonished the world in the
19th century, social movements organized around
class consciousness becoming more prevalentboth
challenged traditional forms of
authority Theater of the 4th wall sought to
maintain an illusion of reality. But, that
illusion depended also on the audience's
completion of the illusion through imagination.
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A photograph of Mielziner's 1949 set of Death of
a Salesman. Darby, Life Magazine, 1949.
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American naturalism Mielziner and Kazan's
production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar
Named Desire (1947)
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Realism and
Naturalism
Naturalism takes up the question of the position
of the individual in a hostile world of social,
economic, political forces. Less psychological
or plot driven, more emphasis placed on class
struggle in an economic system hostile to the
working classes. Determinism? Individual
agency?
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August Strindberg, Miss Julie (1888)
As far as the technical side of the work is
concerned I have made the experiment of
abolishing the division into acts. This is
because I have come to the conclusion that our
capacity for illusion is disturbed by the
intervals... As regards the scenery I have
borrowed from impressionist paintings its
asymmetry and its economy thus, I think,
strengthening the illusion. For the fact that one
does not see the whole room and all the furniture
leaves room for conjecture... Another much
needed innovation is the abolition of footlights.
This lighting from below is said to have the
purpose of making the actors' faces fatter. But
why, I ask, should all actors have fat faces?
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August Strindberg, Miss Julie (1888)
The judgement of authorsthis man is stupid,
that one brutal, this jealous, that stingy and so
forthshould be challenged by the naturalists who
know the richness of the soul-complex and realise
that vice has a reverse side very much like
virtue. Because they are modern characters,
living in a period of transition more feverish
than its predecessor at least, I have drawn my
figures vacillating, disintegrated, a blend of
old and new... My souls (characters) are
conglomerations of past and present stages of
civilisation, bits from books and newspapers,
scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine
clothing, patched together as is the human soul.
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Realism and Naturalism
Maxim Gorky's (1868-1936) The Lower Depths
(1902), at the Moscow Art and Popular
Theatre Note the intense realism, the clear focus
on class struggle. The play takes place in a
flop-house inhabited by criminals.
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Acting Contexts Method Acting

• Constantin Stanislavski (Russian, Moscow Art
  Theater, 1863-1938)
• Believable emotion and realistic characters
  produced through physical actions a grammar of
  acting
• Influenced by the systematic exploration of
  interiority (Freud)

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Acting Contexts Method Acting
Surfaces conceal a much more important well of
action and emotionemphasis is on emotional or
psychological reality underlying the
visible. Assumes a psycho-physical union between
interior and exterior. Method actors use actions
to control their emotions actors can live in
pauses as well as words. They react instead of
acting, fully inhabiting their characters.
Staying in character.
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Photographs of Death of a Salesman. Darby, Life
Magazine, 1949.
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Expressionism

• Anti-realist movement in theater that starts in
  Germany in early 20th century, but spreads to
  America, chiefly in the work of Eugene O'Neill
  and Clifford Odets in the 1920s-1940s.
• Clearest articulation in Bertholt Brecht
  1898-1956
• Dismissed Aristotelian concepts of unity that
  led to theater becoming, as he saw it, about mere
  entertainment placating the masses.

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A photograph of the original set of Death of a
Salesman. Darby, Life Magazine, 1949. Note the
naturalism of the set but note, too, the exposed
roofline, an expressionistic influence.
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A sketch by Jo Mielziner for the 1949 set design
of Death of a Salesman. Miller's original concept
of the set was more naturalistic, but Mielziner
made substantial suggestions that Miller later
incorporated as the stage directions you see in
the text. Note the shadows of the apartment
buildings in the background.
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Expressionism
Highly symbolic, expressive of interior states
also highly political and critical of bourgeois
values of realism, established authority and
codes of meaning Realizes this interiority,
critical aspect through external scenic means
angles, dramatic lighting, sounds divorced from
realistic narrative Rejected the idea that we
should enjoy or fall into theaterbroke the
illusion of the 4th wall. Verfremdungseffekt
overt theatricality, defamiliarize the audience's
expectation, alienation effect.
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Expressionism
Can we speak of money in iambics?... Petroleum
resists the five-act form today's catastrophes
do not progress in a straight line but in
cyclical crises... Even to dramatize a simple
newspaper report one needs something much more
than the dramatic technique of ...an
Ibsen. --Bertholt Brecht
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Expressionism
Paul Green and Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson (1936).
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Expressionism
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), American
expressionist. Here is a later production of his
1920s play, The Hairy Ape. Note the use of
distorted perspective and destabilizing angles,
intense lighting effects, stark cutouts. This
seeks to evoke (or express) a repressive social
regime. O'Neill was very radical for an American
playwright, and highly controversial.
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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Absurdist Theater

• Anti-realist movement in theater another form of
  experimental theater
• Developed in 1950s and 1960s
• Like expressionism, contrary to bourgeois values
  of realism, established authority and codes of
  meaning
• Major themes and stylistic elements emphasized
  mans reaction to a world apparently without
  meaning
• Nonsense, experimental, tragicomedy

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Theatrical and Scenic Contexts Absurdism
Beckett, Waiting For Godot (1955)
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Miller's Scenic Ideology?

• American theatrical context in the 1940s was
  generally conservative, traditional, realistic,
  non-political, though there were experimental
  dramatists and directors working in the field.
• Miller drew both on realism and expressionism
• ...but rejected both in their entirety. Instead,
  he worked to create something new, a synthesis
  between them.

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Miller's Scenic Ideology?
Untempered absurdism and expressionism represent
man as nothing more than a cosmic victim, a piece
of flotsam in a vast ocean over which he has
absolutely no control. But untempered realism
suggests that all is as it seems to be, that man
can indeed master the so-harsh environment that
determines his existence. In realism, cause
clearly leads to effect, and realist plays take
command of that narrative for social
purposes. In Salesman he merges the realistic
and the expressionistic. Neither wholly realistic
nor wholly expressionistic, Salesman draws on
both techniques to suggest social responsibility
and individual agency.
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Miller's Scenic Ideology?
Miller rejected the coldness of much
expressionistic theater, and he also rejected the
abstraction of expressionism, futurism, and
absurdism. Yet, he also rejects a simplistically
mechanistic view of the causal narrative and
scenic elements of realism/naturalism, as we will
see in Salesman. In strict naturalism,
expressionism, and absurdism, man is wholly
determined by his environmentat its mercy, we
might say. He felt that theater, in order for
it to be effective, needed to strike the audience
with authentic emotion about man's relationship
to the world he inhabitsit needs to tell a story
that seeks to bring light to the unseen, hidden
causes that set that story in motion.
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Miller's Scenic Ideology?
His work, especially Death of a Salesman, is
marked by stylistic experimentation. But,
Instead, he insists that there be, in art, an
explicit commitment of some kind to a more humane
vision of life (Bigsby 7)--and this is the
Liberal realist in him. In general, Miller's
plays are concerned with the fate of the
individual in a mechanistic and inhumane, even
potentially totalitarian, system. But, he does
not overwhelm or elide the individual with the
impossibility of the system. Man is not a
cosmic victim (11), but a failed agent he is
essentially flawed, paralyzed by deference to
authority, unable to become the protagonist of
one's own drama (10-11).
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Liberalism and the Humane Tragedy of the Common
Man
For Miller's characters there is always possible
an image of a better future. His heroes are
common people facing the reality of social
inequity, and yet they can assert control over
their fatethey are not, or should not be,
controlled by it, as in the Greek drama that so
influenced him. The tragedy of his characters is
that they are primarily observers, not actors in
their own storiesthey are unwilling, often
through guilt, sometimes through fear, to
intervene on their own behalf or to acknowledge
their responsibility toward others (3-4). His
plays seek to show something important to the
audienceto help them see, remember, and
overcome.
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Art and the Elevation of the Everyday
While Miller was writing in 1949, he was
responding to a cultural moment not unlike our
own. Art has a special responsibility in the
wake of trauma. Miller's investment in the
individual and the humane is evident in his
stylistic choices. What is the role of art in a
world that has witnessedor forgottenthe
Holocaust? That has witnessedor forgottenWorld
War II? The crushing, daily experience of
poverty? What is the role of art in a world that
has witnessedand not yet forgottenNeda Agha
Soltan's murder, or the self-immolation of
Mohamed Bouazizi? For Millerand for humankind
in general, perhapsit must express the
fundamental community of mutually dependent
individuals (Bigsby 5).
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Art and the Elevation of the Everyday
I sought a form, in Death of a Salesman, that
could reflect what I had always sensed as the
unbroken tissue that was man and society, a
single unit rather than two. --Miller,
Timebends A Life (182)
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Reading Assignment
Re-read Act I of Death of a Salesman Read
Tragedy and the Common Man Thank you!
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The Liberal Tragedy of the Common Man
For Miller's characters there is always possible
an image of a better future. His heroes are
common people facing the reality of social
inequity, and yet they can assert control over
their fatethey are not, or should not be,
controlled by it, as in the Greek drama that so
influenced him. The tragedy of his characters is
that they are primarily observers, not actors in
their own storiesthey are unwilling, often
through guilt, sometimes through fear, to
intervene on their own behalf or to acknowledge
their responsibility toward others (3-4).
Willy Loman for instance, would rather commit
suicide than accept a truth that would undermine
what is at once his fantasy of self-sufficiency
and the rootedness of his sense of identity in a
capitalist system commodifies his labor. Willy
Loman is caught in a state of cognitive
disjunctionhe knows, somewhere, that he cannot
subsist in this economic system, and yet he also
cannot admit that his 60 years of labor on its
behalf has been for naught.
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Miller's Scenic Ideology?
His work, especially Death of a Salesman, is
marked by stylistic experimentation. But,
Instead, he insists that there be, in art, an
explicit commitment of some kind to a more humane
vision of life (Bigsby 7)--and this is the
Liberal realist in him. In general, Miller's
plays are concerned with the fate of the
individual in a mechanistic and inhumane, even
potentially totalitarian, system. But, he does
not overwhelm or elide the individual with the
impossibility of the system. Man is not a
cosmic victim (Bigsby 11), but a failed agent
he is essentially flawed (10), paralyzed by
deference to authority, unable to become the
protagonist of one's own drama (10-11).