The New Yorker:

A new play turns Arthur Miller’s experience of directing the play in Beijing into a bilingual meditation on cross-cultural encounters.

By Han Zhang 

In March, 1983, Arthur Miller arrived in Beijing to direct a Chinese staging of “Death of a Salesman” at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. Opening night was six weeks away and his thoughts were crowded with technical and ideological uncertainties. Beijing Renyi, as the People’s Theatre was popularly known, was the country’s most prestigious modern-drama institution, but, all the same, sound effects and music had to be produced with a decades-old East German tape recorder, the set designer was obliged to make a cardboard box stand in for a refrigerator, and the lights would go dim during daytime rehearsals, because the whole city’s voltage dropped when factories were in operation. Miller, who did not speak any Chinese, would be entirely reliant on an interpreter as he directed, and he worried, too, about what else might be lost in translation: could a society long removed from commercial life make sense of a man like Willy Loman, whose dreams and crises were so bound up in nineteen-forties American materialism?

The encounter between Miller and the members of Beijing Renyi is the subject of a new play at the Connelly Theatre, in the East Village, “Salesman之死,” by Jeremy Tiang. As the title hints—pronounced “Salesman zhīsǐ,” it simply means “death of a salesman”—the play flows bilingually back and forth between Mandarin and English. It is surtitled in both languages, and all the roles, including that of Miller himself, are played by a cast of six Asian women, five of whom are Chinese-speaking immigrants. Often making use of Miller’s book about the episode—“Salesman in Beijing”—the play dramatizes the misunderstandings and sudden connections of the rehearsal process, weaving them into a larger consideration of the distances and intimacies between the two countries and cultures.

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