Death of a Salesman_ Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem - Miller, Arthur [4]
When the stage designer Jo Mielziner received the script, in September 1948, it called for three bare platforms and the minimum of furniture. The original stage direction at the beginning of the play spoke of a travel spot which would light “a small area stage left. The Salesman is revealed. He takes out his keys and opens an invisible door.” (385) It said of Willy Loman’s house, that “it had once been surrounded by open country, but it was now hemmed in with apartment houses. Trees that used to shade the house against the open sky and hot summer sun now were for the most part dead or dying.”3 Mielziner’s job was to realize this in practical terms, but it is already clear from Miller’s description that the set is offered as a metaphor, a visual marker of social and psychological change. It is not only the house that has lost its protection, witnessed the closing down of space, not only the trees that are withering away with the passage of time.
In Mielziner’s hands the house itself became the key. What was needed was a solution, in terms of lighting and design, to the problem of a play that presented time as fluid. The solution fed back into the play, since the elimination of the need for scene changes (an achievement of Mielziner’s design), or even breaks between scenes, meant that Miller could rewrite some sections. As a result, rehearsals were delayed, out of town bookings canceled, and the opening moved on, but the play now flowed with the speed of Willy’s mind, as Miller had wished, past and present coexisting without the blackouts he had presumed would be required.
Mielziner solved one problem—that of Biff and Happy’s near instantaneous move from upstairs bedroom in the present to backyard in the past—by building an elevator and using an element of theater trickery: “the heads of the beds in the attic room were to face the audience; the pillows, in full view since there were to be no solid headboards, would be made of papier-mâché. A depression in each pillow would permit the heads of the boys to be concealed from the audience and they would lie under the blankets that had been stiffened to stay in place. We could then lower them and still retain the illusion of their being in bed.” (Mielziner, 33)
The collapsing of the gap between youthful hope and present bewilderment, which this stage illusion made possible, generates precisely the irony of which Willy is vaguely aware but which he is powerless to address, as it underscores the moral logic implicit in the connection between cause and effect as past actions are brought into immediate juxtaposition with present fact. Other designers and directors have found different solutions, as they have to Mielziner’s use of back-lit unbleached muslin, on which the surrounding tenement buildings were painted and which could therefore be made to appear and disappear at will, and his use of projection units which could surround the Loman house with trees whose spring leaves would stand as a reminder of the springtime of Willy’s life, at least as recalled by a man determined to romanticize a past when, he likes to believe, all was well with the world. Fran Thompson, for example, designer of London’s National Theatre production in 1996, chose to create an open space with a tree at center stage, but a tree whose trunk had been sawn through, leaving a section missing, the tree being no more literal and no less substantial than Willy’s memories.
With comparatively little in the way of an unfolding narrative (its conclusion is, in its essence, known from the beginning), Death of a Salesman becomes concerned with relationships. As Miller has said, he