The 40s: The Story of a Decade (91 page)

FEBRUARY 19, 1949 (ON
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
BY ARTHUR MILLER)

T
hough it seems to me that Arthur Miller still has a tendency to overwrite now and then, his
Death of a Salesman
, at the Morosco, is a tremendously affecting work, head and shoulders above any other serious play we have seen this season. It is the story of Willy Loman, a man at the end of his rope, told with a mixture of compassion, imagination, and hard technical competence you don’t often find in the theatre today, and probably the highest compliment I can pay it is to say that I don’t see how it can possibly be made into a moving picture, though I have very little doubt that somehow or other eventually it will. The acting, especially that of Lee J. Cobb, as the tragic central figure, Mildred Dunnock, as his loyal wife, and Arthur Kennedy, as a son whose character he has lovingly and unconsciously destroyed, is honest, restrained, and singularly moving; Jo Mielziner’s set, centering on the interior of a crumbling house somewhere in Brooklyn but permitting the action to shift as far away as a shoddy hotel room in Boston, is as brilliant and resourceful as the one he did for
A Streetcar Named Desire;
Elia Kazan, also, of course, an important collaborator on
Streetcar
, has directed the cast with the greatest possible intelligence, getting the most out of a script that must have presented its difficulties; and an incidental score, by Alex North, serves admirably to introduce the stretches of memory and hallucination that alternate with the actual contemporary scenes on the stage. Kermit Bloomgarden and Walter Fried, to round out this catalogue of applause, are the fortunate producers of
Death of a Salesman
, and I think the whole town ought to be very grateful to them.

The happenings in Mr. Miller’s play can hardly be called dramatic in any conventional sense. Willy is sixty-three years old, and he has spent most of his life as the New England representative of a company that I gathered sells stockings, though this point was never exactly specified.
Recently the firm has cut off his salary and put him on straight commission, and the income from that is obviously not enough for him to get along on, what with a mortgage, and insurance, and the recurring payments on an electric icebox, an ancient contraption about which he remarks bitterly, “God, for once I’d like to own something before it’s broken down!” In addition to his financial troubles, his health and his mind are failing (he has been having a series of automobile accidents, basically suicidal in intent), and his two sons aren’t much comfort to him. Long ago, he had had muddled, childish dreams for them both—the elder, in particular, was to be a famous football star, greater than Red Grange—but things didn’t work out, and now one is a stock clerk, not interested in much except women, and the other, when he works at all, is just an itinerant farmhand. Willy’s deep, hopeless recognition of what has become of him, of the fact that, mysteriously, society has no further use for him, has reduced him to a strange borderland of sanity, in which fantasy is barely distinguishable from reality. The only remaining hope he has, in fact, lies in some crackbrained scheme the two boys have for making a fortune selling sport goods in Florida, and when that collapses, too, there is clearly nothing left for him but to kill himself, knowing that at least his family will manage somehow to survive on the money from his insurance.

That is the rough outline of Mr. Miller’s play, and it doesn’t, I’m afraid, give you much idea of the quality of his work, of how unerringly he has drawn the portrait of a failure, a man who has finally broken under the pressures of an economic system that he is fatally incapable of understanding. There are unforgettable scenes: the interview in which he is fired by the head of the firm, a brassy young man, who plays a hideous private recording in which his little boy names the capitals of all the states, in alphabetical order; a sequence in the Boston hotel, when his son finds him with a tart and his love turns to hatred and contempt; a dream meeting with his brother Ben, who has made a fortune in diamonds in the Kimberley mines and stands, in his mind, as the savage, piratical symbol of success; and, near the end of the play, a truly heartbreaking moment when Willy at last comes to realize that he is “a dollar-an-hour man” who could never, conceivably, have been anything more.

Death of a Salesman
is written throughout with an accurate feeling for speech and behavior that few current playwrights can equal. It may not be a great play, whatever that means, but it is certainly a very eloquent and touching one. The cast, besides Mr. Cobb, Miss Dunnock, and Mr.
Kennedy, includes Cameron Mitchell, Thomas Chalmers, Howard Smith, Don Keefer, and Alan Hewitt. They are all just what I’m sure the author hoped they’d be.

APRIL 16, 1949 (ON RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S
SOUTH PACIFIC
)

W
hile
South Pacific
, the only musical, as far as I know, ever to be based on a Pulitzer Prize book, lacks the special quality of
Oklahoma!
, a sort of continuous sunny gaiety, it has about everything else. Richard Rodgers’ score, if not his best, certainly isn’t far from it, and Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics, with one or two exceptions, are just as successful; the plot, a difficult combination of sentimental love, tragic passion, and the rowdy behavior of our armed forces, is admirably handled on all three levels; the performances, especially those of Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin, are practically flawless; and Jo Mielziner’s sets, ranging from the cockeyed disorder of a naval base to the strange beauty of a tropical island, are executed with extraordinary humor and charm. Altogether, it is a fine show, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were still at the Majestic when another Presidential election rolls around.

I don’t remember James Michener’s stories very clearly (somehow I have a feeling that they weren’t really especially memorable) but I do know that it never occurred to me that they might furnish material for a musical comedy, since, like most honest pieces about war, they hadn’t much in the way of orderly design and an acceptable love interest was conspicuously missing. However, Mr. Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, who collaborated with him on the libretto in addition to serving as director, have taken care of all that with the greatest possible ingenuity. The principal theme now is the romance between an exiled French planter, who didn’t, as I recall, appear at all in Mr. Michener’s book, and a jaunty nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas, who did turn up in one of the stories, though in a rather different context. The only obstacle to their marriage is the fact that he is the father of two children by a Polynesian wife, and though she has died, it is a circumstance that would probably make any young woman think twice.

The secondary plot has to do with a lieutenant of Marines and his affair with a beautiful native girl. This is doomed from the outset, partly because her mother is a disreputable old baggage, dealing in grass skirts and shrunken human heads, but mostly because he is a native of Philadelphia and a graduate of Princeton and, naturally, somewhat conscious of his glorious heritage. These two separate but parallel stories are firmly joined together in the end, when the two men undertake a suicidal mission against the Japanese (an English remittance man was the hero of this episode in Mr. Michener’s version), in the course of which the Marine is killed but from which the planter comes back to the nurse, who by now has realized the error of her ways. As you can see, this is a fairly weighty narrative sequence, calling for a liberal administration of comic relief. I’m glad to say that the authors have been generously and happily inspired about that, too, creating any number of fine, tough characters and providing them with some wonderfully funny material, including a vaudeville number, featuring Miss Martin in an outsize sailor suit and Myron McCormick with a full-rigged vessel tattooed on his heaving stomach, that may be the best show-inside-a-show you ever saw.

Some time ago, in an interview, Cole Porter remarked that he wished to hell theatre critics would refrain from discussing music, on the ground that even the most educated of them wouldn’t recognize the national anthem unless the people around them stood up. Having taken this advice to heart, I will confine my comment on Mr. Rodgers’ score to saying that “Some Enchanted Evening,” magnificently delivered by Mr. Pinza, seems to me a tremendously moving song; that “I’m Gonna Wash That Guy Right Outa My Hair” and “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy,” as rendered by Miss Martin, and “There Is Nothing Like a Dame,” as sung, or bellowed, by the naval personnel, strike me as being among the liveliest of Mr. Rodgers’ and Mr. Hammerstein’s joint efforts; and, to intrude one dissenting note in this rhapsody, that I wasn’t particularly impressed by “Bali Ha’i,” which sounded to me a good deal like any number of other songs celebrating exotic place names, or by something called “You’ve Got to Be Taught,” a poem in praise of tolerance that somehow I found just a little embarrassing.

There is nothing, of course, to say about Mr. Pinza’s voice, beyond the fact that no greater one has been heard on the musical-comedy stage. Since he is also an intelligent and imposing actor, his appearance in
South Pacific
is one of the pleasantest things that have happened to the theatre this season. Miss Martin, whose talents as a comedienne haven’t
had much scope, at least in New York, since she first enchanted us all with “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” has just what she wants this time, and I think her performance is a delight from beginning to end. Of the others, Mr. McCormick gives perhaps the funniest and most hideous female impersonation in history; Betta St. John is astonishingly lovely as a kind of Tonkinese Madame Butterfly; Juanita Hall, as her unspeakable mother, is not only an accomplished comedienne but also the possessor of another notable voice; and there are sound, attractive contributions by William Tabbert, as the faithless Princetonian, and by Martin Wolfson and Harvey Stephens, as a couple of irascible officers. The nine young ladies who represent Navy nurses didn’t look very medical to me.