During the 2015 centennial year of Arthur Miller’s birth, his plays were produced at theaters around the world, his books were published in new editions, and his life and literature were discussed at university symposia. It was a heady time for Miller enthusiasts, who came together to share their zeal for reading his work and staging his plays. It was also a time when Miller’s impact within China was acknowledged through revivals of past productions of his plays, new stagings, and theater projects beyond China’s borders that reexamined his experience and influence there. My path to scholarship on Miller began in the 1990s while living in the Chinese theater community where I learned about the 1983 staging of Death of a Salesman in Beijing and Miller’s impact on Chinese theater artists both before and after that watershed production. Understanding “Miller in China” requires examination of three discrete but interrelated phenomena: dissemination of his plays as texts and in productions by professional theater companies in Chinese cities; Miller’s residence in Beijing in 1983 when he collaborated with Ying Ruocheng to direct Death of a Salesman; and the impact and legacy of these events domestically and transnationally. Some of the material in this essay is drawn from my introduction to the 2015 centennial edition of Miller’s 1984 book Salesman in Beijing (retitled Death of a Salesman in Beijing), which resulted from conducting interviews with actors, directors, designers and others in Beijing and Shanghai who had worked with Miller directly in the 1980s and who have staged his plays in China since, as well as reviewing archival material from those productions.
Thirty years passed between China’s first encounter with Miller’s published plays in English just before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 and circulation of his works in Chinese translation after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In between, the new communist government kept most western literature, culture, and people out of China, with rare exceptions such as Soviet experts who disseminated Stanislavski’s theories at places like the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. During the subsequent thirty years, artists in Shanghai and Beijing staged Miller’s top plays, the most significant of these productions being Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983 directed by the playwright himself. In the wake of Miller’s death in 2005 and the global revisiting of his works in 2015 during the centennial of his birth, Miller’s dramas were revived on Chinese stages for a new generation of audiences. Concurrent to this was a post-centennial emergence of new, cross-cultural collaborative works outside of China about Miller’s impact there, focusing on his partnership with Ying Ruocheng in 1983. The tale of Ying and Miller’s Sino-American Salesman project became an object of fascination for like-minded theater artists in the United States and Canada and led to the staging of Miller, his wife, and their Chinese colleagues from 25 years ago as characters onstage in two bilingual theater works created for twenty-first century international audiences. Intended to familiarize diverse communities with this historical event and pose questions about the challenges of collaborating across cultures, these projects in New York and Vancouver reconstructed and reframed the events they recalled, reproducing the 1983 Beijing production and its contingent processes on stage for twenty-first century audiences in North America and Asia.
Miller Is Encountered and Adopted (1949–1980)
To situate Miller in China, it is helpful to understand the eastward journey of Western theater long before his arrival there. The origins of Chinese huaju (spoken drama) are traced to a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin performed by overseas Chinese students in Tokyo in 1907.1 Shortly thereafter, spoken drama troupes were formed in Shanghai and Beijing, and plays by dramatists such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shaw were staged alongside plays in the new Western form written by their Chinese counterparts like Tian Han and Cao Yu. This “westward gaze” in the theater began as part of a larger cultural shift toward the vernacular in literature and toward adopting foreign models to address China’s social issues. Western-style drama was deliberately imported to China by pioneering Chinese intellectuals and not disseminated by foreign colonizers; thus, Chinese spoken drama has a long history as a Sinicized cultural form used for domestic purposes. It also has a long history of adapting new trends via the temporary visits of foreigners who come to China as collaborators or performers. Arthur Miller became part of this tradition in 1983 when he traveled to Beijing to direct Death of a Salesman.
Since that landmark production, Miller has been securely positioned in the top trio of American playwrights in China, alongside Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Their plays are staged frequently in China, assigned to students in universities and theater academies, and are the subject of dozens of Chinese books, doctoral dissertations, and journal articles. While research on O’Neill and Williams encompasses the full range of their respective works and careers, the focus of Miller scholarship and productions tends to be more on The Crucible and Death of a Salesman than his other plays, essays, and other writings.
When Miller first visited China in 1978 with his wife Inge Morath, he was relatively unknown, whereas O’Neill and Williams were already firmly established in the Western dramatic canon of literary and art circles in Shanghai and Beijing.2 Miller’s plays had not yet been translated into Chinese. An article with a summary of six of his plays had been authored by Mei Shaowu (son of Beijing opera actor Mei Lanfang) in 1962 but had not circulated widely. Even the worldly Huang Zuolin—a leading director and scholar who had studied at Oxford and helped disseminate the theories of both Stanislavski and Brecht in China—was not familiar with Miller or his plays before his 1978 visit. But three years later, Huang would be the first Chinese director to stage one when he directed The Crucible in Shanghai. China was closed to most foreign influences during the chaotic and devastating decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); exposure to arts and education was minimal, and students and intellectuals were “sent down” to the countryside to live and labor alongside peasants. The academic and artistic reopening of China came on the heels of Miller and Morath’s visit: Mei Shaowu published more articles about Miller’s plays in 1979, and Chen Liangting’s translations of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman were published in 1979–1980. Every year since then has seen at least one publication of an article, play translation, or book by or about Arthur Miller (Wu et al. 2015, 3–4).
It is unclear whether Cao Yu, China’s foremost playwright of the twentieth century, had heard of Miller when he met him in 1978—Ying Ruocheng contends that he had, but other accounts report that Cao Yu acknowledged right in front of Miller that he had no idea who he was (Ying and Conceison, 158; Wang, 17–18). Cao Yu, fluent in English, along with fellow Chinese playwright and novelist Lao She, had spent a year touring the United States after the end of World War II, with Lao She remaining in New York for an additional three years. Miller’s first significant stage success, All My Sons, did not come until 1947, making it possible that Cao Yu returned to China before Lao She learned of this play or of Death of a Salesman.3
I took it away and started reading. I finished it that same night. I was so drawn to the play, but immediately thought it would be impossible to produce at that moment in China … But it left a very deep impression on me … While I was still a student at Tsinghua, I imagined what it would be like if only we could stage [it] … by my senior year, I had my mind set on three plays [to stage]. One was Death of a Salesman. (122–23)
Ying Ruocheng would graduate from Tsinghua a year later, and he immediately became a founding member of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, China’s premiere theater company. He would not fulfill his dream of staging Salesman until 30 years later. O’Neill and Williams never collaborated with artists in China on productions of their own plays, so this aspect of Miller scholarship in China—the groundbreaking cross-cultural event of Miller directing Death of a Salesman in Beijing in 1983—is one that understandably receives a great deal of attention. In addition to discussions of the project in published sources by Chinese and Western journalists and scholars, the first-hand record of that encounter from Miller’s perspective lives on in his published diary, Death of a Salesman in Beijing, and from Ying’s perspective endures in his autobiography Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China’s Revolution and Reform.5 Ying’s narrative also details his extraordinary life as an artist and pubic intellectual, eventually rising to a government appointment as Vice Minister of Culture from 1986 to 1990: the perilous events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 shook his previously steadfast faith in the Chinese Communist Party and he managed to extricate himself from his post.
As well known in China as Miller was and is in the United States, Ying Ruocheng was a famous stage actor, revered translator, and pioneering director, bringing plays like Major Barbara and Amadeus to the Chinese stage. He was also a renowned film actor, both in Chinese cinema and television, and in international film, playing Kublai Khan in the international miniseries Marco Polo and featured roles in Bernardo Bertolucci’s films The Last Emperor and Little Buddha. In addition to collaborating with Miller, Ying brought other foreign artists to China, including Charlton Heston to direct Caine Mutiny Court Martial at Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1989. When Miller received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honor in 1984 from President Ronald Reagan—alongside Lena Horne, Isaac Stern, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Danny Kaye—it was Ying Ruocheng who introduced him at the event that was broadcast to homes throughout America.
Miller Is Staged and Restaged (1981–2012)
After meeting Miller in 1978 and discussing his plays with him, Huang Zuolin decided to stage The Crucible at Miller’s recommendation, and he commissioned Mei Shaowu to translate the script. Miller suggested his 1953 hit play because during that initial visit to China, Ying Ruocheng and Cao Yu had introduced him to writers and artists, and he had learned of their sufferings during the previous decade of political turmoil. He felt the play’s depiction of the historical Salem witch hunt of 1692 (standing in for the purges of McCarthyism in the 1950s) provided an ideal metaphor for the targeting of Chinese intellectuals who endured endless campaigns during the Cultural Revolution. Not surprisingly, Huang Zuolin’s version, with a new title The Witches of Salem, included deliberate allusions to the Cultural Revolution that echoed the “Scar Literature” discourse of the day. Critically well-received, it ran for fifty-two performances.6
Huang’s 1981 production juxtaposed a symbolist set design featuring a large cross with a Stanislavski-based realist acting approach. The cast learned about the history of witches in seventeenth-century European Puritan society and considered the inner psychology of their characters, though the play’s sociopolitical metaphor was clearly about China’s Cultural Revolution. In 2006, the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre restaged The Witches of Salem to commemorate the centennial of Huang Zuolin’s birth, inviting his grandson Zheng Dasheng to direct the new production. Zheng used a very different style than his grandfather, creating a play-within-a-play aesthetic in which actors (including star couple Lü Liang and Song Yining and veteran actor Xu Chengxian, who had appeared in the 1981 version) wore contemporary clothing and remained on the periphery watching the action during scenes in which they did not appear. One critic referred to the production as a refreshing take on a classic play in an era of “cultural fast food” (Han, 75).
In addition to these two professional stagings of The Crucible in Shanghai, director Wang Xiaoying mounted an award-winning production of the play in Beijing in 2002. Retaining the title Witches of Salem, Wang created an expressionist aesthetic that featured set pieces such as towering abstract wooden forms and huge white masks, and oversized rope nooses that suddenly flew down to hang above the audience at a climactic moment. Wang explained that he wanted to apply a “small theater concept” to a large proscenium space, and so he deliberately constructed an oppressive atmosphere coming at the audience from all directions, surrounding them on four sides and even from above. Wang adopted the Chinese convention of “realistic make-up,” which included darkening the skin of the actress playing Tituba, and putting wigs in various lengths (long and short), textures (curly, wavy, and straight), and hues (white, red, brown, black) on both male and female actors. The acting style Wang developed was in scale with the visual elements—grand and emotional, at times histrionic. These melodramatic impulses, while in direct contrast to the aesthetic Miller carefully crafted for his 1983 production of Salesman at Beijing People’s Art Theatre, continue to appeal to mainstream Chinese audiences today. The 2002 Witches of Salem production won numerous accolades, including three Plum Blossom Awards for its leading actors.
[Miller] was rather keen on trying out new forms. For instance, the walls didn’t exist for the people in the play anymore … Willy could walk through any wall. He could communicate with whoever he was in the mood to. And Arthur created the necessary ambience for such things to be believable, to be credible. People were shocked—especially Chinese audiences, who were not accustomed to this kind of surrealistic style… (160–61)
Scholars and journalists who have written about the project discuss timing, political atmosphere, the play’s ambiguity, and its themes of capitalism and the American Dream as all being both challenges and key contributors to the production’s success. Opinions in 1983 were divided on whether China’s lack of American-style salesmen or life insurance would be a barrier to Beijing audiences, and whether they could sympathize with an ambiguous protagonist who did not possess the moral attributes of a hero (Wang; Miller; Ying; Houghton; Ou and Zhaoming; Wu et al.).7 In interviews with press and in his own diary, Miller stressed the goal of “show[ing] that there is only one humanity” and Ying Ruocheng emphasized the universality of the relationships in the story, both of which helped avoid the divisions mentioned above and evade political interpretations, such as the demonization of individualism or capitalism.8 It was a particularly sensitive time for Sino-American relations, as 19-year-old tennis player Hu Na had just defected while playing in the Federation Cup tournament in California and been granted political asylum in the United States, putting a halt to all government-sponsored Sino-American cultural exchanges for 1983, including in sports and the arts. Because the Salesman project was not funded by the government, it continued, observed with great interest from both sides.
As a visiting artist in China, Arthur Miller was a distinguished ambassador of the American theater, and he was fortunate to have skilled partners who helped him in the enterprise of bringing Death of a Salesman to the Beijing stage. These included his wife, Inge Morath, whose study of Chinese language and passion for Chinese culture he credits with inspiring the couple’s visit in 1978, and Ying Ruocheng, who was already a leading figure in Chinese theater and cultural circles as an actor and translator. Fluent in English, widely read in Western literature, and married to Wu Shiliang, a gifted actor and translator in her own right, Ying Ruocheng was that rare citizen with the capacity to translate not only language, but also cultural difference. Ying’s participation and interventions were a key factor that made the Beijing production the lauded success it became and the landmark it remains (Ou and Zhaoming, 61–64, 67–69).
It was Miller who insisted that Ying both play the role of Willy Loman and craft a new translation of the play. Ying Ruocheng’s script became a renowned case study in Chinese-English drama translation (Deng, 149–51). Completing the task in only six weeks in preparation for Miller’s arrival, Ying’s 1983 version differed from Chen’s previous translation because Ying maintained Miller’s linguistic style, but infused the dialogue with colloquial Beijing speech and local flavor, one of the hallmarks of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre repertoire. While the language spoken by the Lomans emerged from the hutongs (lanes) of Beijing, their utterances were still situated in a Brooklyn, New York context.
This cultural hybridity would become an important aspect of the play in its rehearsal process, audience reception, and enduring critical legacy. As Miller discusses in his diary and Brenda Murphy analyzes in her survey of international stagings of Death of a Salesman, a central question of the Beijing production was defining the location of the action and the nationality and ethnicity of the Lomans. In employing Beijing dialect and slang in his approximation of Miller’s colloquial New York English, Ying Ruocheng attempted to replicate “language that would have been spoken in a crowded Chinese city at the end of the 1940s,” while preserving references to places like Yonkers and Brooklyn. Ying asserts that “the best result is when the play is performed and, after five minutes, the audience forgets about the actors’ appearance and ethnicity and buys into the belief that they’re watching Americans” (162–63).
According to Ying, as Miller journeyed through the rehearsal process, he began to see the cast as a second-generation Chinese family in Brooklyn. Mi Tiezeng, the actor who played Happy in the Beijing production, recalls that Miller continuously encouraged him not to imitate a foreigner, but told him to “act yourself” (Mi). Playing an American onstage for the first time, Li Shilong as Biff wanted to please the distinguished guest director, though he had never heard of him before and had never read his plays. Li’s strongest memory—one shared by every member of the cast I have interviewed—is of Miller timing every scene of each rehearsal with a stopwatch. Miller insisted that the pace of the play be precisely the same as the Broadway production of his original English version. Li admits that at first he found this bizarre, but gradually he came to realize that this constraint placed on the actors prompted a transformation that shifted from external to internal: when actors had to speed up their lines, it resulted in less overacting and more “natural” delivery of dialogue with clearer motivations.
Miller explained to the actors that the play was written for everyone, not just Americans, and that parents, children, and siblings are similar all over the world: “He told us to act like a Chinese mother, father and son,” Li recalls (Li). Miller describes the result of this process as “creating something not quite American or Chinese, but a pure style springing from the heart of the play itself—the play as a non-national event, that is, a human circumstance” and concludes that the actors became “Lomans-as-Chinese-looking-people [placing] them in some country of the mind, I suppose, certainly not in any earthly geography” (131, 145).
Introducing a new stage aesthetic to China, just as it had in the United States when it premiered in 1949, the 1983 production of Salesman in Beijing challenged (and ultimately rejected) the conventional practice of using what Chinese theater artists call “realistic makeup” (xianshi huazhuang) in the form of facial pigment, wigs, and nose and chin prosthetics for Chinese actors playing foreign roles. Intended to approximate racial verisimilitude on stage from the Chinese audience’s vantage point, “realistic makeup” appears to the occasional foreign audience member who attends Chinese plays (including Miller in 1983 and myself in the 1990s) to be a form of ethnic drag or even to “turn [the actors] into Halloween spooks” (Miller, 5; Wang, 70). One of the most frequently discussed legacies of Miller’s direction of Salesman in Beijing is his departure from this conventional practice of using costumes, makeup and mannerisms to convey a “real” foreigner. This “real” is, of course, highly imagined, resulting in an effect similar to the “yellowface” adopted in American films of an earlier era, such as The Good Earth (1937), in which Western actors portray Chinese characters to the satisfaction of viewers of their own race. Miller was resistant to adopting the entrenched Chinese tradition of realistic makeup onstage because of the semiotic distancing between his self-perception and the visual construction of Caucasian identity presented to him in Chinese bodies and faces, which triggered American political associations with racist representations in earlier performance forms such as blackface minstrelsy. In reimagining the Loman family as a Chinese American family living in Brooklyn, whether or not that was a reality local audiences could grasp, the production evoked culturally integrated reception: the unfamiliar story of the plight of a New York salesman, set in a particularly American domestic and national idiom, portrayed through the bodies, faces, and linguistic expression of Chinese actors who remained, for the most part, “Chinese.”
The “wig incident” (jiafa shijian), as it has come to be known, is one of the most frequently cited events of the mounting of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983 and its legacy. Miller describes the event in great detail in his account and Ying notes its significance, as do all cast members I have interviewed, as well as published scholarship about the production in both Chinese and English. In his diary entries from April 25–29, Miller recounts his struggle to convince the costume, makeup, and wig staff at the theater—appealing to Ying Ruocheng as the linguistic and cultural bridge between them—to abandon their plans to wig and make up the entire cast to look like foreigners. This caused not only a substantial loss of face for the hardworking staff, but also left them and some of the actors bewildered. As Brenda Murphy points out, “Chinese actors felt naked on stage without heavy make-up and wigs” (122). While Miller was sensitive to these ramifications, he stood his ground, identifying the central conflict as the actors “want[ing] to imitate Americans, to play-act people they are not, when what I want is exactly who and what they really are” (155).
This telling moment strikes at the heart of fundamental questions of both artistic practice in the theater (playing “the Other” on stage) and of cross-cultural perceptions off stage. While for Miller, the actors donning wigs in rehearsal conjured blackface minstrelsy and Hollywood excess, and made them “weirdly unidentifiable, not only as individuals, but as humans” (155), for the cast members themselves it was a tool long used in their acting training to play foreign roles. The earliest modern Western dramas in China at the dawn of the twentieth century employed a more presentational style of acting, but as scholar Wu Ge illuminates, once Stanislavski’s techniques were introduced in China via Soviet experts in the 1950s, the relationship between actor and character shifted from “I play” to “I am,” making actors more—not less—dependent on makeup and wigs to achieve this transformation (52–55).
In short, while Miller regarded actors approximating the physical appearance of foreigners as off-putting and alienating due to his own aesthetic training and sociopolitical circumstances, Chinese actors found the absence of these markers off-putting and alienating on the same basis: Chinese actors feel more like foreigners when they do not look physically Chinese. Miller’s authority as the director, as the author of the play, and as a real foreigner trumped the comfort and conventions of the cast and artistic staff of the theater, with Ying Ruocheng as the conduit for each side to comprehend the perspective of the other. As Wu Ge and other scholars have pointed out, Miller’s resistance to embrace Chinese modern drama staging conventions, while sensible and even crucial from his cultural, aesthetic, and moral perspective, revealed a lack of familiarity and deep understanding of the history and effects of these practices in China (54, see also Sun). A compelling question remains whether this lasting legacy of how foreigners have been portrayed at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre from 1983 up to the present reflects the liberation of isolated Chinese artists, as Miller interpreted it, or the vestiges of neo-imperialism that shape Chinese practices according to Western models. Participants, audiences, and scholars of the production debate the ultimate cultural meaning of this shift, but all acknowledge that the practice of Chinese actors playing foreigners on stage was changed by Miller’s visit to China.9
Arthur Miller’s influence in China emanating from Death of a Salesman in 1983 goes far beyond removing wigs and makeup, however. In the wake of the production, new Chinese plays that adopted some of its hybrid realist-expressionist techniques found their way to the stage, most notably Jin Yun’s Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (1986), which imitated elements of Salesman’s structure, character and even plot: the main character is a peasant struggling to keep his land who throws himself in front of a fire at the end of the play, hinting at suicide.10 In terms of the long-term influence of the actual collaboration with Miller on his actors and the impact of the live performance on audiences, cast members fondly recall the director’s supportive, caring manner toward actors, and they speak of working with Miller as one of the most enriching and satisfying experiences of their careers. They also describe the deep impression that seeing the production left on individual audience members, including a Peking University professor who was so moved by the play that he walked all the way back to the campus reflecting on it afterwards—a distance of 11 miles (Li).
As the curtain came down, there was absolute silence for what seemed to us [actors in the wings] like a long time. […] And then, all of a sudden, I don’t know who started it, but it came like an avalanche: the applause came forth and it didn’t end. Everyone was cheering. I was relieved and excited—all of that effort had not been in vain … the audience rushed forward to the edge of the stage, shouting and pointing. (167)
At the end they would never stop applauding. Nobody left …The gamble had paid off, the Chinese audience had understood Salesman and was showing its pride in the company. The row of Americans were cheering, […] eyes were red and wet, Ambassador Hummel was pounding his palms together, and I thought Chinese and Americans alike were trying to assure each other of the durability of both countries’ affection. (251–52)
The landmark cross-cultural collaboration established a deep bond between the two men, as detailed in Miller’s diary. Miller mentions Ying Ruocheng on the first page of the original edition of his book, the last page of his book, and almost every page in between, and Ying’s image is included on the cover of every version of the book that has been published, and in most of Morath’s photographs inside.
Death of a Salesman was performed in Beijing more than fifty times after Miller returned to the United States, and then toured to Hong Kong and Singapore. This original Beijing version was the only production of the play in China for nearly thirty years, until another director at Beijing People’s Art Theatre, Li Liuyi, mounted a new and very different version in 2012 for the sixtieth anniversary of the theater company. He localized and contemporized the story without changing the script, steering the actors’ interpretations toward evoking a trendy current-day Chinese vibe rather than a 1950s foreign feel. Ironically, in creating this hypermodern sensibility, Li and the actors drew on traditional xiqu (Chinese opera) elements, by staging the play in the vast space of the Capital Theatre using only minimal physical elements, most notably invoking the xiqu convention of “one table and two chairs.” As both director and set designer, Li Liuyi employed minimalism, using only a few chairs, a table, a bench, a Juliette balcony protruding from an enormous back wall, a cluster of tree branches, the iconic refrigerator, and numerous white spheres of varying sizes scattered across the enormous stage. Lighting effects cast looming shadows to create an expressionist, nearly futuristic environment with a universal feel. The production was highly regarded by critics and moderately appealing to mainstream audiences, running for a respectable 22 performances in Beijing People’s Art Theatre’s largest proscenium venue, where Miller’s production had been performed three decades prior.
In 1983, Miller traveled to China to direct Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in Beijing. The play was a smashing success and deeply touched the Chinese people. In 2004, my theatre and I planned to invite Miller to return to China for a production of All My Sons. Unfortunately, he left the world forever before this was possible, but his work and soul have never left us. (Lei)
Employing a Brechtian style, Lei added a narrator who directly addressed the audience, and she incorporated film projections to highlight the lead character’s mental state. She also drew parallels between the story of lives sacrificed for the sake of business in Miller’s play to recent events in China, such as the 2008 tainted milk scandal.11 Under the co-direction of Lei and University of Kansas University Theatre Artistic Director Mechele Leon, the cast and crew subsequently traveled to China where the production was remounted as part of the 2012 Shanghai Contemporary Theatre Festival. Thus the production is unique on many fronts: a professional Chinese director worked with American college students to perform an American play in English; a college production developed in the United States traveled to China for an encore performance in a vastly different cultural context; and Miller’s play All My Sons premiered in China more than thirty years after it was initially considered for production in Beijing.
Miller Is Revived and Reconstructed (2015–Present)
The first professional Chinese staging of All My Sons followed three years after Lei Guohua and Mechele Leon’s Kansas-Shanghai project, in a production directed by Luther Fung for the Hong Kong Federation of Drama Societies as part of the Miller centennial in 2015. Shanghai and Beijing likewise made plans to join the international theater community in commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the playwright’s birth. The Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre (SDAC) intended to stage Death of a Salesman with experienced Miller director David Esbjornson invited from the United States, and featuring Lü Liang in the lead role, but it was changed to a production of Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie when Lü became unavailable.12 The project was picked up again under Chinese director Lin Yi, and Lü Liang finally took the stage as Willy Loman in Shanghai’s first-ever production of the play in 2020.
To mark the Miller centennial in Beijing, the National Theater of China (NTC) not only revived Wang Xiaoying’s 2002 production of The Witches of Salem (featuring the same cast that performed thirteen years earlier), but also staged China’s premiere of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, directed by Zhao Yi, which opened in January 2016. Three years later, in March 2019, the Face Theater Group (Renmian jutuan) in Shanghai presented a reading of Mt. Morgan with scripts in hands, minimal costumes, and no lighting or set design, in a small, simple white room that evoked the feel of the play’s Chinese title Teshu bingfang, which translates as a special hospital ward or patient’s room. In addition to these live performances in recent years, the Royal National Theatre in London partnered with the National Theatre of China in 2015 to screen videotaped performances of British theater productions in cinemas and similar settings throughout China. Called NT Live and supported by the British Council, the screenings are distributed by ATW Culture Media Ltd. to more than 20 cities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, reaching hundreds of thousands of people.13 NT Live featured Ivo Van Hove’s production of Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 2018, and the 2019 International Theatre Live Festival opened with the Old Vic’s production of The Crucible.14 According to Li Congzhou, the CEO of ATW Culture Media, audiences for NT Live in China are mostly young (ages 20–35), highly educated female fans of British and American television and film (China Plus).
While British theaters staging Miller’s plays are broadcasting those performances to the Chinese public, continuing the flow of his work from West to East, theater-makers in North America are transferring the story of Miller’s Beijing adventure in 1983 and its resulting production from East to West. This transnational flow is a constellation of networks that intersect with the content and themes of Miller’s experience of staging Death of a Salesman in China: embodying the Other on stage, situating dramatic material in new national and cultural contexts, working in a bilingual environment through translation, navigating hierarchies of authority, and negotiating opportunities for inclusivity. Salesman in China, a Canadian collaboration, and Salesman 之死, an American collaboration, each feature a new Ying-Miller style duo that bears similarities and differences to their predecessors. Both projects were inspired by a past reading of Miller’s 1984 book about his experience in Beijing. In each case, the person inspired to create the piece (the “Ying” half of the duo) approached the other to be a collaborative partner and write or co-write the script (the “Miller” half of the duo), with the “Ying” figure being Western and “Miller” being ethnically Chinese. Without any awareness of each other, or any subsequent contact, both pairs began work on their projects at approximately the same time (2017) and with strikingly similar content, issues, and audiences in mind—but developed them with unique qualities that illuminate the broadly applicable facets of the “Salesman in Beijing” story.
Though separated by many miles, both Michael Leibenluft and Leanna Brodie, upon first reading Miller’s 1984 book sometime around the start of the new millennium, immediately imagined it as a story to dramatize on stage.15 Like Ying after encountering Miller’s 1949 play, they kept the idea in the back of their minds for years and then picked it up at a future date. For American Leibenluft, the flame was reignited when he spent several years after college in Shanghai studying theater and directing plays, and then continued his practice in New York. For Brodie, it was when she moved to the community of Richmond, British Columbia (a satellite city of Vancouver) where half the population of roughly 200,000 identifies as Chinese and 60% of all residents were born outside of Canada, the highest immigrant population in the country (Sy).16 The multilingual, intercultural environments in the United States and Canada in which Leibenluft and Brodie each were creating theater became fertile ground for staging the events that took place in spring 1983 at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in China.
Brodie, an accomplished translator, and playwright/director Jovanni Sy developed their production concept and script for Salesman in China together by first traveling and interviewing people in the United States, Canada, and Beijing who had collaborated with Ying and Miller, and by researching in archives and museums, as well as reading closely Miller’s Salesman in Beijing, Ying’s Voices Carry, and academic articles and press materials related to the 1983 production. Between 2017 and 2020, a three-year residency with Playwrights Theatre Centre, along with script workshops at the Stratford Festival and Banff Playwrights Lab, facilitated collaborations with actors at various stages of the work. The first public event, entitled Unscripted: Salesman in China in February 2018 at Gateway Theatre, was advertised as “a border-crossing, time-travelling community event” and featured a scene from Miller’s Death of a Salesman performed in both Chinese and English, a presentation about Ying and Miller’s collaboration in 1983, a panel on play translation, and an extensive lobby display featuring timelines, video footage, an interactive “Memory Booth,” and Beijing-inspired snacks. The first time Brodie and Sy’s script-in-progress was presented in a reading was after the playwrights’ retreat at the Stratford Festival later that year. The ultimate goal is for a fully bilingual production of the play to be performed in both North America and China in partnership with a Chinese theater company, preferably the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. As articulated in their artistic statement, “it’s a great story” and has dramatic chops: “Ying and Miller had an audacious dream where the odds were stacked against them from the start. They avoided pitfalls and concocted ingenious solutions to triumph and leave an enduring legacy” (Brodie).
Leibenluft’s experiment, Salesman 之死 (“zhisi” meaning “death of”), was jumpstarted with a fellowship in 2017 from LABA: A Laboratory of Jewish Culture at New York City’s 14th Street Y, where he gathered four bilingual actors of Chinese descent for a preliminary exploration that involved discussion of the 1983 production and exposure to the background history and archival material. He approached Jeremy Tiang (a Singaporean playwright, translator, and theater artist based in New York City) about collaborating first as dramaturg and then as playwright. Together with the performers, they developed a “collage piece that included short scenes from Salesman performed bilingually, intermixed with interviews amongst [them]selves about how they envisioned the characters and the play, as well as their own experiences being immigrant and Asian American artists in the US” (Leibenluft). Miller and Ying were not yet characters in the piece; rather, the actors related the people in Willy Loman’s world to their own personal experiences.
This fluidity of characterization was expanded as the play took shape, with a cast of five performers eventually portraying more than fifteen identities: the actors from the 1983 Chinese cast as well as roles they played (Ying/Willy Loman, Zhu Lin/Linda, Li Shilong/Biff, Liu Jun/Woman from Boston), along with Miller and his wife Inge Morath, Ying and his wife Wu Shiliang, Miss Shen the interpreter, a production designer, and a few others. In addition to these roles—all of which appear in the Canadian project—Leibenluft and Tiang created five new characters in a structural element that connects the two narratives of the existing play-within-a-play to a third narrative. This “contemporary coda” comprises the final section of the performance and “positions the 1983 collaboration in relation to our current geopolitical and cultural moment” (Leibenluft). The coda in the first workshop production in 2018 examined the isolation of and pressures on Chinese students at American universities, linked through the plot element of a student at Ohio State cramming for an exam on the play Death of a Salesman and the generation gap between her and her mother that echoes that between Biff and Willy in Miller’s play. In the revised script for the 2020 premiere in New York, the coda again explored tensions between a mother and daughter, but this time surrounding the timely issue of college entrance examination cheating scandals in the United States.17
The Leibenluft-Tiang play Salesman 之死 specifies a cast of all-female or nonbinary performers, thus exploring gender dynamics along with “investigat[ing] the dynamics of translating ideas across culture and language, the intrinsic power dynamics and misunderstanding and opportunity for empathy” intended by the project (Leibenluft). In terms of how their production depicts the partnership at the center of the story, Leibenluft and Tiang and their cast constructed “heightened versions” of Ying and Miller and “their personas in the public imagination” rather than “realistic portrayals” because both are public figures (Tiang). They envision it not set in the literal setting of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre of 1983, but “in more of an abstracted rehearsal room in today’s world” (LABA). At the center of the piece have always been its bilingualism and the desire that it be comprehensible and enjoyable to bicultural/bilingual and monolingual audiences alike.
The Brodie–Sy play Salesman in China emerged from many similar goals of exploring cross-cultural encounters, power dynamics, female agency, and linguistic interplay, with some contrasting results. Its casting calls for a minimum of a dozen actors, with some doubling of parts, though for the most part according to conventional gender assignments. As a feminist, Brodie sought to de-marginalize the women in the “male-centered narrative” by foregrounding Morath and Wu Shiliang along with Zhu Lin, Liu Jun, and Miss Shen (interpreter) throughout the play. In Salesman 之死, Tiang addressed this dominance of male subjects in the events of 1983 by including a scene about halfway through the script that begins with a projected title reading “For once, Mrs. Ying and Mrs. Miller get a scene” and features Morath, Wu Shiliang, Zhu Lin, Liu Jun, and interpreter Shen, but no male characters—it is the only scene in Salesman 之死 in which none of the actresses plays a male role.
Both plays stage the “wig incident” as a climactic turning point in the plot and substantial dramatic conflict that includes both humor and pathos. Salesman in China divides the embarrassed and affronted designers into three individuals—Mo the Wigmaker, Hui the Make-up Artist, and Gong the Props Guy—while Salesman 之死 combines them into one character named Designer Huang. Brodie and Sy’s version, while maintaining the core dramatis personae featured in Tiang’s script, populates the play with additional characters who were actual participants in the 1983 project: Zhu Xu (the actor who played Charley), Mi Tiezeng (Happy), Gladys and Xianyi Yang (friends of Ying who were English translators of Chinese literature), Sam Rosicky (US cultural attaché), and the aforementioned renowned playwright Cao Yu, who was President of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre and extended the formal invitation to Miller to direct his play in China.
Another addition in Salesman in China is peripheral characters designated as being inside the heads of the two main characters. In much the same way Willy Loman interacted with his brother Ben from his past and imagination in Death of a Salesman, Miller converses with Elia Kazan and Howard Smith in Salesman in China, and Ying Ruocheng communicates with his father Ying Qianli.18 This echoes one of the stated goals of the play’s creators—“getting inside the heads of characters whose cultural background and experience of the world has been so different from [our] own”—as articulated by Brodie. Like Leibenluft and Tiang, Brodie and Sy seek to offer a theatrical experience that challenges Sino-American cultural perceptions and, while bilingual, is accessible to audiences whose language might be limited to either Chinese or English. Their characterization of Ying and Miller strives to stay more historically accurate by “trying to stay true to who we, and most of the general public, perceive Miller and Ying to be … [so] that even if we’re making up a scene and putting words in Miller and Ying’s mouths, the people who knew them best could … see [them] saying that” (Sy). When it comes to the rapport between the two men, both the American and Canadian project creators infused the pair with lively dialogue and witty banter that displays their dry wit, quick reflexes, and mutual respect and affection, though the two plays offer audiences Arthur Millers and Ying Ruochengs with distinctly different personalities.
Indeed, one of the dilemmas of staging the story of the staging of Salesman, according to both duos (Leibenluft/Tiang and Brodie/Sy) is finding a balance between historical accuracy and compelling theater. They are aware that most audience members know little or nothing of the story of Miller and Ying in Beijing in 1983, and thus they face the challenge of presenting a narrative that reflects the story relayed in the two mens’ respective memoirs that inspired the project. At the same time, they speak of “finding theatrical truth…rather than being bound to biographical detail” (Brodie) and “allowing enough creative room to let the story breathe, not creat[e] a history biopic” (Leibenluft). Both productions interweave scenes of rehearsal and performance reconstruction—that suggest what it might have been like inside the process of staging Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983 China—with behind-the-scenes moments such as press conferences, private conversations, and personal ruminations. From Miller’s diary, his assessments of the actors and designers are brought to life on stage, while from Ying’s autobiography, their assessments of Miller are expressed just as strongly—some humorous, some thought-provoking, and all intended to invite the audience to critically reflect and consider the rehearsal and production process from multiple vantage points. By mining diverse source material and the creative talents of an ensemble of actors to stage a story previously known only from Miller’s point of view (via five editions of his book “Salesman” in Beijing between 1984 and 2015, and from newspapers, magazines, and television coverage of the event in 1983), Salesman in China and Salesman 之死 extend Miller’s influence in China beyond Chinese national borders to reach new global audiences.
To fully understand “Miller in China,” then, one must first go to China, following in the path of his plays, productions, and his own artistic collaboration there, examine its legacy for the Chinese theater community ever since, and then travel back to North America to see Miller in China—as he was and is imagined to have been—performed on Canadian and American stages.
- 1.
The Chinese version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin performed in Tokyo in 1907 was adapted from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel (not George Aiken’s stage melodrama), with a few significant plot changes and theme emphases. China’s earliest Western-style stage dramas (later dubbed “huaju” or spoken drama) developed from wenmingxi (civilized drama) that were modeled on Japanese forms called shingeki and shinpa (for more, see Liu 2013). Many prominent Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century studied abroad at universities in Japan, England, France, and the United States.
- 2.
Miller and Morath visited China in 1978 as private citizens (not as foreign experts) under the auspices of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, with support from the newly established Center for US-China Arts Exchange. Miller had tried unsuccessfully to obtain a visa to visit China in 1973 and 1976 (for more details, see Wang 2017, 11–12).
- 3.
All My Sons premiered in NY in 1947, winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award; Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and Antoinette Perry Award (among others) and ran for 742 performances.
- 4.
Cao Yu also attended Tsinghua University, graduating in 1934, more than a decade before Ying attended.
- 5.
Death of a Salesman in Beijing (2015) was originally published as Salesman in Beijing in 1984 with subsequent editions in 1991 and 2005. Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform was published in 2009. Ying Ruocheng and Arthur Miller died within two years of each other (Ying in 2003 and Miller in 2005).
- 6.
The Crucible is called “The Witches of Salem” or “The Salem Witches” in some other countries/languages as well, including French (Les Sorcières de Salem) and Spanish (Las Brujas de Salem).
- 7.
For a particularly thorough examination of the trajectory of the Ying-Miller project in 1983, the cultural and political challenges and debates, and multifaceted impact and legacy, see especially Wang (2017) and Ou and Zhaoming (2013).
- 8.
- 9.
This does not mean that foreign characters in Chinese plays are no longer depicted using wigs, facial prosthetics, makeup—indeed often they still are—but Salesman introduced the option of actors playing foreigners without these markers of “foreignness” if desired. From 1983 on, this became a choice that directors and designers have made distinctly for each production. Wang Xiaoying’s 2002 production of The Witches of Salem—and its 2015 revival—are an example of post-1983 productions that retained the conventions of ‘realistic makeup,’ as discussed in this essay.
- 10.
Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (Gou’er ye niepan) is widely regarded as the most significant Chinese play of the 1980s. Directed by Lin Zhaohua, it won the National Best Play Award in 1986. Ying Ruocheng directed his own English translation of the play at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1993, the same year he directed Death of a Salesman at the College of William and Mary (about which he notes, “I must admit that when I was directing Salesman, it felt rather odd at times to be explaining to American actors how Americans behave” [184]).
- 11.
In July 2008, milk and baby formula containing the banned chemical melamine (added to boost protein content) caused the severe illness of hundreds of thousands of babies in China (including six fatalities). Public admission of the crisis by authorities was delayed until after the Beijing Olympic Games in August. Eventually, several individuals held responsible were prosecuted and imprisoned (two were executed).
- 12.
The Esbjornson production of a classic American play was part of a series of annual Sino-Western collaborations hosted by SDAC—the previous two years had seen co-productions of Moliere’s School for Wives with a French director and Uncle Vanya with a Russian director.
- 13.
Though intended to be broadcast live via video feed during actual performances in the UK, NT Live screenings are pre-recorded in China because of the six hour time difference (an evening performance in England begins at midnight in China) and because of strict censorship regulations in China that require advance access to the scripts and broadcasts by officials before they can reach the public.
- 14.
For more on NT Live in China during this period, see the following links, https://www.britishcouncil.cn/en/shakespearelives/arts/ntlive; http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-06/01/content_29572058.htm; https://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-07-28/filmed-plays-bring-broadway-and-west-end-to-chinas-silver-screens-101123508.html.
- 15.
Neither Brodie nor Leibenluft was able to pinpoint exactly when they read the book for the first time: Brodie recalls it was sometime between 1996 and 2007, and Leibenluft read the book as an undergraduate sometime between 2006 and 2010.
- 16.
Vancouver is the third largest city in Canada with over 2,250,000 people, more than half of whom speak a mother tongue other than English. Its population is 28% Chinese.
- 17.
The public workshop directed by Leibenluft was staged in Long Island City (NY) at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (LPAC) as part of its Rough Draft Festival in April 2018, featuring Julia Brothers, Vivian Chiu, Chun Cho, Julia Gu, and Jing Xu. The play’s 2020 premiere presented by Target Margin Theater was co-produced by Leibenluft’s company Gung Ho Projects and the Yangtze Repertory Theater, and adopted a new title: Salesman 之死: The (Almost!) True Story of the 1983 Production of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre Directed by Mr. Arthur Miller Himself from a Script Translated by Mr. Ying Ruocheng Who Also Played Willy Loman.
- 18.
Brodie and Sy dubbing these characters “The Inside of Their Heads” seems to be a nod to Miller’s original title for Death of a Salesman, which was The Inside of His Head. Elia Kazan was the director of the 1949 production (which previewed at the Colonial Theater in Boston before moving to Broadway), and Howard Smith was the actor who played Charley. Ying Ruocheng’s father, Ying Qianli, was a prominent intellectual in Beijing who fled to Taiwan in late 1948 when Ying Ruocheng was in college, and never saw his family again, dying in Taiwan 20 years later during mainland China’s Cultural Revolution (his family did not learn of his 1969 death until many years later).
Thank you to Bloomsbury for its permission to draw material from my introduction to the 2015 centennial edition of Miller’s 1984 book Salesman in Beijing, retitled Death of a Salesman in Beijing, for use in this chapter.