In thinking about the metaphor from which to construct the production matrix I was struck by the image from my memory of children playing Blind Man’s Bluff. Willy is the bland man and the others are unwilling to teases, and, at least, half-blind themselves. The boys each have their own reaction to Willy. Happy is almost an accomplice as he believes the illusions his father created about his own importance. Biff seems to know that his father is, and may always have been self-delusional, but he wants no responsibility for helping. Linda has a stake in the delusions. However, they have become so bad that she is afraid she will lose Willy, who is her reason to live. She has always been a co-dependent in the same sense as with an addict or an alcoholic. Linda knows that he has tried to commit suicide and that he has been unable to make enough money, but she does not confront him. Willy’s blindness can be symbolized by giving him a white cane or by using a blindfold. Other characters can each wear a patch over one eye with Linda wearing large, thick-lensed rose-colored glasses. This doesn’t need any explanation; it is simply a loaded image. Other characters need no patches or glasses, because their vision is stark and clear and does no matter anyway.
The house, which is the central object for Willy and this play is not in correct proportion to the human body. Of the many visual symbols, it is the most important, according to Mieltziner1, who used it differently, creating movable pieces and lighting. My set is more static, but illusory and a bit surreal. In my production, it is larger, but surrounded by skyscrapers painted to the ceiling and disappearing in clouds on either side. Lights will be projected when the skyscrapers are visible. The main room is the kitchen and the appliances, cupboards and tables and chairs will all be somewhat larger than they should be in reality in order to convey the image of the people being smaller than they should be. This adds to the tragedy, since these people are just common ordinary people, and not really important to anyone. The set will have one main room above a tiny space for the garden, and small bedrooms will be above the kitchen, just enough room to accommodate the number of characters. The hotel room, the bar and the office will all be above these and proportionately smaller, except that the edges of the room of the office at the top with the hotel room and bar, both on the same level below, will not be visible, giving it an illusion of limitless vastness. All will be connected by two or three steps. The last scene will take place on the lowest level, the garden, which will be transformed into a graveyard by the rising of gravestones and the projection of a mausoleum in the background of the house. When it is garden, it is bare, except for a Greek statue on a fountain, perhaps of Prometheus. Bound.
The set conveys the impression that this house and its inhabitants have been left behind, overshadowed by progress. That the garden becomes the graveyard symbolizes the fatal flaw in Willy. He puttered uselessly in a barren garden where the sun never reached, much like he lived his life, ineffectual, living in a dream and never accomplishing anything, In the end, in his attempt to pay off the house he deeply and finally hurt the only person who ever loved him unconditionally.
The entire set is behind a scrim curtain to help control the very critical lighting. Lighting and fog will make the difference between current action and memory. For remembered scenes or imagined dreams, the lighting will change from what has been designated for each scene and fog will be emitted around the edges. There are no really flashbacks, as everything is in Willy’s mind. 2 The lighting in the garden will change from normal to dark amber for remembered scenes. The lighting in the bedrooms for remembered scenes will be dark green for the boys and dark purple for Willy and Linda. The hotel room lighting is dark rose and the bar is dark with candles and flashing neon as the only real light. The office lighting is bright on a stark, empty space that has fogged edges. Whenever we are in the past the skyscrapers will fade away as their projected lights will go out. Only the room being used will be visible. The rest of the set will be dark.
The idea that the office is higher than the rest is a psychological clue. The office, more or less, controls the action, even though most of it takes place elsewhere, since that is where the authority lies which takes his job and the last vestige of what Willy dreamed. It took his last hope of paying off the house and actually accomplishing something. Howard, his boss, calls him :kid: which seems rather demeaning. When Willy says he doesnt want to travel Howard fires him, and does not allow him to change his mind. While Willy has fatal flaws of character, being too kind and not being able to see reality, which causes his downfall, the loss of the job and the juxtaposition of Willie and the cold and calculating Howard, who just has no room for Willy, not even for one additional month.
The sound should incorporate something which mimics the chorus of the Greek tragedy in places and plays soft blues in others on piano in the bar and the hotel room and saxophone or clarinet in others. The play actually fulfills Aristotle’s requirements for a tragedy, with six the elements required, listed in order of importance: 1) Plot; 2) Character; 3) Thought or Theme; 4) Diction, sometimes called voice; 5) Song or Melody and 6) Spectacle. 3The plot is a classic tragedy that the characters conspire to bring about and cannot escape. They each suffer from some degree of blindness or inability to change. The house, surrounded, symbolized their imprisonment in the circumstances of their own making. Willy cannot change or see the truth. Ben is the muse and part of the chorus as is Charley, the voice of reason. Biff is the only one who actually learns something from the play. Happ is the son who tried to fulfill his father’s dreams and not his own, and even at the end is still caught up in the idea.
HAPPY: All right, boy. I’m gonna show you and everybody else that
Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have — to come out number-one man.In the end we still see that Willy was trapped by his dreams.
LINDA: He was so wonderful with his hands.
BIFF: He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.
HAPPY (almost ready to fight Biff): Don’t say that!
BIFF: He never knew who he was.
Linda is the tragic heroine, doomed by her faithfulness and love to be alone in the end. That she knows full well where everything is leading is the classic character of the Greek Tragic heroine. She wants everything to be like it was when the boys were children, in harmony, before their real dreams were forgotten.
Act 1: BIFF: Shouldn’t we do anything?
LINDA: Oh, my dear, you should do a lot of things, but there’s nothing to do, so go to sleep.
…..
LINDA: It’s when you come home he’s always the worst.
…..
BIFF (evasively): I’m not hateful, Mom.
LINDA: But you no sooner come in the door than you’re fighting!
BIFF: I don’t know why. I mean to change. I’m tryin’, Mom, you understand?
The rest of the characters are chorus, fulfilling the requirement for “song”, each saying something different, but explaining the action. The overall theme is progress versus humanity, and progress wins. Willy grew up in the time of relationship salesmanship, and he failed to change with the times. Progress overshadowed everything he did, just as the skyscrapers enclosed the house. The voice is the oracle, he who cannot change is doomed to become obsolete. The spectacle is the play, especially the arguments, and the artistic portraits of crumbling stone figures. The garden music should be a soft blues harmonica. Music should be barely audible until near scene endings or time transition, where it can get louder to signal change.
Root Actions
The play is about progress and death, love and need. These elements oppose each other in this play as progress leaves Willy behind and his only alternative is death, because he cannot change. He cannot admit that he did anything wrong, not even in his allowing Biff to see him and the buyer with whom he slept. He cannot separate his daydreams (delusions) from reality, or take any responsibility for his own fate. The needs of the characters often obscure their love and defeat its expression. If Willy had loved Linda more than he needed her and needed for her to need him he could have taken the job which Charley offered and the house would have been paid off and Linda would have had everything she needed, which was her place as his wife in a house in security and happiness with Willy. The boys are both trapped in their own needs. Happy needs to feel important and Biff needs to understand his father and free himself from the mistakes of the past which were built upon that one incident with the buyer in the hotel room.
Aristotle points out, the most important element “is the arrangement of the incidents, for tragedy is an imitation, not of men but action and life, of happiness and misfortune”4 This play symbolizes all the Lomans of the world, ineffectual, trapped by their own illusions, frozen in place by their needs. The real tragedy of this play is that it is repeated over and over by people who fail to take control of their own lives and fail to see reality and deal with it. It is progress that surrounded and dwarfed the house, obscuring the garden so that ho sun ever reached it. Progress made Willy obsolete as a salesman. New management and new ways of doing business left him behind. Progress made his brother a rich man, which seemed to haunt Willy, as if it were only luck. Progress even changed his employer as the son of his boss took over the business. There are always those who cannot change with progress and are doomed to be under the train. Just as the trains brought permanent change to the old west, cities and skyscrapers brought change to neighborhoods. Those who did not either adjust to progress and make use of it or , at least, get out of the way were run over by it.
Thematic Subject: Those who cannot change are doomed and those who cannot see will stumble in the dark. Willy cannot change and he cannot see the reality of the world. His son Happy is exactly the same, and he will end his life alone because of it. Linda is trapped by her love for Willy even though she can see reality. She cannot escape, because she has nothing else.
Production Matrix
This play is a game of Blind Man’s Bluff, where one blindfolded person stumbles around trying to touch the other players, as the characters stumble through their lives not knowing where they are going or, in Linda’s case, not wanting anything else. IN the worst-case scenario of a game of Blind Man’s Bluff, all the players are blindfolded and none of them ever find any of the others. The only winner among these characters is Biff, and he wins only his freedom, not necessarily happiness. He cannot recover what he has lost, but he can finally get away and build his own life. The outcome is predetermined just as in any Greek tragedy where the gods have already decided. In this case the gods are progress and wealth.
Initial Ideas
Performers
The fates of the various characters are sealed though only Linda knows this. Linda knows that Willy is living in a dream world, that he is losing his mind, but she does not know what to do, and she is afraid that she will lose all of him if she tries to do anything.. The will stumble through their parts blinded to truth and reality or partially so, and still arrive at their designated end. The house, which is almost a character itself, will sit smothered by progress where no sunshine reaches and become a mausoleum for Linda. Happ will continue in his father’s footsteps and Biff will escape.
Language
The language is a mantra and chorus following a set pattern like an ancient narrative poem. The characters use the words which symbolize their own traps. The words illuminate only for the audience. The characters never hear them, they only speak.
Set
The set is very important as it provides clues to the tragedy and the symbols for the play. The set is the carved place for these characters, as solid as any stone wall, and they are trapped within it. Even when they move into the past, they are still trapped within the same walls. This shows how the characters are trapped in the tragedy, as in all classic tragedies. The set is almost another character in the person of the house, which is all that Linda has left at the end of the play.
Space
The space is all wrong, not fitting the people quite right. They are too small in a very small house which is obscured by the progress of a growing city. The main space is the kitchen, where the furniture and the appliances are just a bit larger than they should be. The space starts with few props, symbolizing the coming of emptiness.
Sound
The sound is of ragged voices, a chanting chorus and blues played softly to remind us that all is lost. There is no exciting music and no wonderful truths revealed in this script, only inevitable loss.
Conclusions
This play relies mostly on its characterization and script. The setting is another character, and it changes as the needs of the script are required. The setting is a symbol of the status of the Loman family, frozen in time while the world went on. The characters are all either actors or classical chorus as this is a modern Greek tragedy. All of these factors make the play both timeless and durable since one can see it performed over and over and still enjoy it while knowing everything which will happen.
Footnotes
- Death of a Salesman. The Broadway Production. p. 19.
- Elia Kazan. Preparation for Death of a Salesman. p. 261.
- Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Trans. George Whalley. Ed. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997.
- Aristotle. On Poetry and Style 99.