Every salesman has a dream. The themes of Death of a Salesman are universal. The search for personal identities transcends what divides cultural identities. Beyond linguistic and cross-cultural points of friction, whether in China or America, a common thread weaves ‘one humanity.’
When Arthur Miller visited China to direct Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983, it was potentially dangerously counter-cultural and yet it became the most significant cultural event in China since the Cultural Revolution. The story of this socio-political intersection behind the curtains has since become the basis for a riveting play that is even more timely today. All eyes are on this bi-lingual achievement of director Jovanni Sy and Leanna Brodie who, together, have co-written Salesman in China for its upcoming world premiere at the Stratford Festival.
Stratford Today: Like your previous production, Nine Dragons, Salesman in China is set in the past and challenges the audience to consider issues of prejudice that confront us today. As a writer, do you seek historical settings as a mechanism for expressing your ideas about current issues?
Jovanni Sy: I love historical plays. No matter when or where my plays are set, they’re always about the here and now. Writing period pieces is a great way of talking about today as a point of access for people. Nine Dragons is set in Hong Kong in 1924, but for sure I was talking about the same kinds of questions about identity, the effects of colonization, and the politics of class and race. I was talking about that in the 21st century even though I set it in British Hong Kong.
I love the power of allegory. I think it affords the viewer some safety and distance. They might not realize that I’m talking about our society, but somehow, by the end, people realize it is pertinent to the times we’re living in now.
The other thing that brings people together and creates a cushion of safety is genre. Nine Dragons was really accessible to a wide swath of the audience, because it was a detective story, which is a genre that everybody loves. It was almost like an early prototype of what we’re doing here with Salesman in China. 40% of our show is in Mandarin. With Nine Dragons, it was five per cent in Cantonese with subtitles. I wouldn’t have been able to conceive, co-write and direct Salesman if I hadn’t gone through the learning process of Nine Dragons.
ST: Another recent production of yours, The Tao of the World, presented a satire that challenged your audience’s awareness of their own lived experience and lessons learned during the pandemic. Since the pandemic, along with various geopolitical events, we’ve seen a rise in Sinophobia. Salesman is therefore so appropriate, if only because of that. Did this factor into why you wrote the play when you did, and why you felt it so important to share this story now?
JS: The idea came before, but it is more timely now, because we have seen how easily an ethnic group can be scapegoated, or demonized, and how recent world events have definitely turned things. It’s really hard to demonize the other when the other is more familiar to you. The more we create silos, the easier it is to do an “us and them,” but when you get people in the same room, you realize we probably have more in common than not. That’s what theatre is so great a- building empathy, and helping you understand what another person’s life is like; just stepping in their shoes for a minute. The more we as a people are able to do that - to realize what other people’s dreams and burdens are - the harder it is to paint a whole group with the same brush.
ST: What was the initial spark that inspired you and Leanna to co-write this play and direct it?
JS: We’ve never done anything theatrical together, our practices have been very separate, and we’ve never co-written with anyone, but we both saw why this should be a story we tell together. It’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done, to create a play like this with my wife. But it was her idea, and she was inspired because the themes and the situation of the play resonated with our own reality back in Richmond, BC in 2015.
Theatre is a beautiful medium for offering alternate perspectives; giving voice to the other. It is a significant and important means of expression for big ideas that bring people together to facilitate change. Theatre has a way of persisting and insisting on its importance, because it’s where people come together in communion, and only experience it live, and only with others in the same space, which is not the case with streaming and mass media. It’s an engine for change, and to create bridges.
ST: Your decision to mount the play in Chinese imbues authenticity to the telling of the story and also creates an immersive experience for the audience. How did you navigate constructing this as a bilingual production with that added dimension of complexity to the writing and performance of it?
JS: Leanna never conceived of it being any other way. As someone who has been doing Asian-American, Asian-Canadian theatre for thirty plus years, there are lots of conventions for how to convey that someone is speaking a language other than English. We use that to our advantage. Sometimes you’re looking at it from Arthur Miller’s point of view, where you don’t quite get what’s going on. The bilingual experience is not only the means to tell the story, but it’s also part of the story itself, that requires the immersion of the audience into the linguistic duality of the story. It’s really embedded into the experience of watching it.
ST: For some viewers that linguistic duality is more challenging. How do you transition that potential distraction into a hook for engagement?
JS: The surtitles are within the same field of vision as the action on the stage, but there are some people who just don’t like watching foreign cinema, or non-English shows. There are some people who don’t want to read when they watch, and that’s fine, but the trend these days is accepting shows with surtitles or subtitles. What is the most popular show in the history of Netflix? Squid Game. Now there are shows like Pachinko and Shogun. People want a good story, as long as they have a way to understand it, and are getting used to reading while they watch.
ST: Staging scenes in which the lead character, Ying Ruocheng, exists simultaneously in his past, his present and in the character of Willie Loman, must have presented quite a unique challenge. How do you, as a director, work through those spaces and realize how to stage them?
JS: One of the benefits of co-writing this with Leanna is that I had a visual idea; nothing seemed un-stageable, because I already had a mind to it. I already had an idea of how they would physically work in space, and how I would use technical elements of light and sound to help with some of those transitions, to help with the story when Ying is in that in-between space.
ST: Ying Ruocheng’s character seems to embody an extension of both Biff and Willie, but in so far as there are parallels, Ying is not a tragic figure, he is the protagonist, and a hero of sorts, who actually accomplishes his dream and lives. As he weaves in and out of his relationship with his father and his past, and the dichotomies between Chinese and American expectations, what does his character represent to you? Do you identify yourself in his character’s need to share this story?
JS: Ying is me. The weird thing is: that happened later. I said to Leanna one day, ‘My God, Ying and I are so close’. And she just looked at me and said, ‘Ya!’. She knew all along. I’m almost the same age as Ying when he starred in Death of a Salesman in ’83. One of the odd things when we wrote the first drafts of the play, was that it was Miller who was the protagonist, and it was only when we came to Stratford with Bob White, that Bob said, ‘Why Miller?’.
Once it was told through Ying’s lens, it became a much more interesting story. We’ve all already seen the fish out of water story. From Ying’s perspective, he’s juggling so many competing interests, and he’s such an interesting character - the way he’s stretched in different directions, and at the same time still has to play one of the most demanding roles with so much at stake.
Once we started fleshing out Ying, somehow, probably in my subconscious and in Leanna’s, a lot of what he’s going through was informed by what I’ve gone through in my career - with far lesser stakes than what Ying was dealing with - but it was a point of reference that makes Ying very relatable to me. So, when I tell the story, I really feel like I understand him. I always identify with Ying.
ST: What does it mean to you to be presenting the world premiere of Salesman in China at the Stratford Festival?
To be here means the world to me, personally. I’m making my Stratford debut in the 33rd year of my career. When I started, I longed to be here. It’s the place where I saw my first few plays. All my earliest happiest theatre memories are from this place, so it has a special place in my heart.
When I see the curtain call, probably in our first preview, and I see nineteen people take a bow and fifteen of them are Asian, I’ll probably cry, because that’s never happened here, ever. Just to see the kind of care and investment that the Festival has put in to telling this story the correct way, with integrity, and to see the bodies on stage like nobody’s ever seen before - and not in supporting roles, but playing challenging, fleshed-out characters - that’s going to be a beautiful thing. It means everything to me.
When I was a kid here, seeing shows and loving this place, nobody looked like me, and it never occurred to me I could do what they were doing, but maybe a kid seeing our play will say ‘Hey, I can do that!’ I hope it has a legacy, and I can’t help but believe that some kid is going to watch our show and say, ‘maybe that can be me’.
A Salesman In China premiers at the Stratford Festival August 3.
