ARTHUR MILLER
PLAYWRIGHT

Miller: Death of a Salesman
by Brenda Murphy

Chapter One: The Broadway Production  Excerpts

THE DESIGN PROCESS

While the casting proceeded, the biggest unanswered question about the script, the design concept, was being addressed. On 24 September, Jo Mielziner received a call from Kermit Bloomgarden asking whether he could come straight over and talk to him about "something very interesting" [JM 24]. After learning that Kazan hoped to begin rehearsal of the play in two weeks, Mielziner left the meeting with the Salesman script to read. During that afternoon and evening, Mielziner began to understand the difficulty of the job he was faced with: "It was not only that there were so many different scenic locations but that the action demanded instantaneous time changes from the present to the past and back again. Actors playing a contemporaneous scene suddenly went back fifteen years in exactly the same setting - the Salesman’s house" [JM 25].

As he looked for a design solution to the many changes in scene and time demanded by the script, Mielziner hit on the concept that was to become the key to the production:

The most important visual symbol in the play - the real background of the story - was the Salesman’s house. Therefore, why should that house not be the main set, with all the other scenes - the corner of a graveyard, a hotel room in Boston, the corner of a business office, a lawyer’s consultation room, and so on - played on a forestage? If I designed these little scenes in segments and fragments, with easily moved props and fluid lighting effects, I might be able, without ever lowering the curtain, to achieve the easy flow that the author clearly wanted [JM 25-26].

 

From Miller: Death of a Salesman by Brenda Murphy,  pp. 1-17.

Copyright � 1995 by Brenda Murphy.  Used by permission of Cambridge University Press.

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