Play reimagines Arthur Miller’s staging in China of his drama Death of a Salesman

His complicated collaboration with Miller on Death of A Salesman has now been turned into its own semi-fictitious drama, premiering this month at The Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre (it opens on August 26, with previews from August 3). The Canadian festival is known for its Shakespeare line-up, but it has also developed a reputation for staging new works.

Salesman In China is written by Jovanni Sy and Leanna Brodie, two veterans of the Canadian stage and real-life partners. Sy, who is Chinese-Canadian, is also serving as director.

“We found a second-hand copy of Miller’s memoir of this project in Vancouver. It’s called Salesman In Beijing and I started reading it and thought, oh, this is a play!”, Brodie says. “It has so much to say about both our lives as an interracial and intercultural couple and as theatre artists.

“But I felt I couldn’t tell this story alone. The only person I could imagine working with me on it was Jovanni. It’s weird because we’ve never collaborated in our 30 years together.

“We are both artists with our own visions. But this is a play about two people with strong views coming at it from different cultural places, so I feel like that dynamic actually helped us.”

In addition to Miller’s diary, they also relied on Ying’s autobiography, Voices Carry, co-written by China scholar Claire Conceison, as source material.

The original 1983 show did not come easy. There were artistic and cultural hurdles, as well as political complications. A prominent Chinese tennis player’s defection to the United States that spring caused several US-China exchange events to be cancelled.

Death of a Salesman was allowed to continue, and the challenges for Miller to direct in China are legendary.

“There’s a moment that is talked about in Chinese theatre as the wig incident,” Brodie recalls. “The Chinese performers assumed they would engage in the traditional practice of portraying Westerners using make-up and wigs.”

Sy adds: “It’s kind of grotesque, over the top by Western standards, with prosthetic big noses, big chins, super white skin powder with exaggerated big eyes. It just looks kind of clownish. When Miller saw it, he was like ‘NO!”

“It was the biggest moment of clash between Miller’s aesthetic and the aesthetic of the Chinese artists,” Brodie continues. “It leads to interesting questions like, was Miller liberating the Chinese artists or was he practising his own form of imperialism?”

There were other divergent ideas. Miller initially wanted to do The Crucible, but Ying convinced him Death of a Salesman was more forward looking.

A bigger issue in dramatising the story is that both artists’ memoirs are written in academic formats with little anecdotal dirt.

“What they didn’t record were the conversations and the dramatic content,” said Brodie. “We had to fill in these parts, imagining what Ying, who had to be very guarded, would think. Both of them are people with a public and a private self, and they only share a small portion of the private self. For compelling drama, we need the whole person.”

For the two playwrights, a key route to distilling the compelling narrative was switching the story’s perspective from that of Miller to Ying.

“One day our dramaturge just asked, why is this Miller’s story?” Sy says. “Neither of us was willing to fess up that maybe a big festival like Stratford wouldn’t be interested if Miller wasn’t the hero.

“We realised by centring it on Miller, we wouldn’t be treading new ground. We’ve all seen fish-out-of-water stories with a white guy learning a lesson. Ying is the one who has to juggle multiple competing priorities. He’s the one who’s going through the wringer and has more at stake.

“So dramatically it makes perfect sense for it to be from Ying’s point of view. Who’s the most fascinating person in this story? Sorry, it’s Ying.”

Brodie notes: “It’s not just about puncturing stereotypes. We’re trying to communicate a story of people putting their heart and soul into crossing personal and cultural bridges.”

Playing the role of China’s elder thespian is leading Singapore stage and screen performer Adrian Pang. He confesses he wasn’t overly familiar with Ying’s career, but says the play’s themes resonates deeply for him as someone who regularly straddles East and West projects.

“To play Willy Loman has been on my bucket list,” Pang says, referring to Death of A Salesman’s tragic anti-hero. “I feel this piece powerfully and profoundly excavates Ying and Miller’s personal stories.

“It really strips away their masks and armour, to see them as flawed, imperfect and slightly damaged human beings.

“Ying was always a very guarded man. His public persona always had a veneer of performance. There’s a sense that he’s constantly presenting a very diplomatic face to everyone. That could have been taken as a negative, but it actually freed us to imagine, interpret and almost invent an inner life.

“The play’s running theme is about bridging different cultures, beliefs, outlooks, and backgrounds. Ying is basically trying to be a bridge, feeling the weight of it and trying to stay strong.”

When Death of A Salesman opened in 1983, it played successfully for months at the Beijing People’s Arts Theatre in China, before moving to the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, and on to Singapore.

Now the play about this memorable production is making its own history at Stratford with a mostly Asian cast, much of the dialogue in Mandarin, and co-written and directed by a Chinese-Canadian.

“Recently, we had a cast and crew barbecue with so much food and so much fun,” Brodie says. “At the end of the night, the guys were playing mahjong, the women singing Chinese karaoke, and the younger cast happily sprawled out on couches playing with their phones. It was so Chinese.

“I thought, this is now the Stratford Festival right here.”

“Salesman In China”, Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, 99 Downie Street, Stratford, Ontario, Canada. Until October 26.