Salesman in China: East Meets West via an Arthur Miller Masterpiece

Martin Morrow*

Salesman in China, by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy, suggested by the memoirs of Arthur Miller and Ying Ruocheng; Chinese translations by Fang Zhang; directed by Jovanni Sy. August 3 to October 26, 2024. At the Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada.

In the annals of East-West cultural exchanges, few have been so unlikely as the Mandarin-language production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1983. What could Miller’s postwar classic, often seen as a critique of capitalism and the American Dream, possibly have to say to an audience of Chinese Communists?

Ying Ruocheng (Adrian Pang) as Willy Loman in Salesman in China. Photo: David Hou

It’s a question Miller repeatedly asked himself when he was invited to direct his play at the invitation of its translator, Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng, who would also take the starring role of Willy Loman. It’s one both men bravely set out to answer over a six-week rehearsal period—a both frustrating and enlightening journey dramatized in a rich, revelatory new play by Canadian playwrights Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy.

Salesman in China, which had its world premiere in August 2024 at Canada’s Stratford Festival, draws on Miller’s 1984 book Salesman in Beijing, a journal of his eye-opening experience, as well as Ying’s posthumous autobiography, Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform (2008), which places the event in a broader historical context. Brodie and Sy have used those sources to thrillingly capture a watershed moment of intercultural collaboration that can only be poignant in light of the current animosity between China and the West.

Salesman in China Official Trailer | Stratford Festival 2024

Not that it was easy. Miller hoped he could “sell” Salesman to the Chinese by emphasizing its universality. On the first day of rehearsals, we see the playwright (portrayed by Tom McCamus) tell his Chinese cast to forget about the supposed anti-capitalist message and other interpretations. It’s a play about fathers and sons, he says.

That’s all very well, but there are a couple of fundamental problems: It is also a play about a failed travelling salesman who sees his life-insurance policy as the key to his family’s financial salvation. In China, Ying (Adrian Pang) tells Miller, there are no travelling salesmen—or life-insurance policies.

Adrian Pang as actor Ying Ruocheng (left) and Tom McCamus as playwright-director Arthur Miller in Salesman in China. Photo: David Hou

So begins the struggle to find some common ground in Miller’s story. As it turns out, its theme of a father’s expectations for his son does strike a chord in China. Willy Loman famously places all his wildest hopes for success on his oldest boy, Biff. Li Shilong (Steven Hao), the actor playing Biff, points out that Chinese fathers likewise aspire to have their sons become “dragons.”

The theme, we later discover, also touches Ying Ruocheng personally. Salesman is one of his favourite plays, and he has long dreamed of doing it. But as he takes on the monumental role of Willy, he finds himself haunted, just like the depressed salesman, by phantoms from his past. His grappling with those ghosts—and, by extension, the legacy of China’s Cultural Revolution—forms the nucleus of Brodie and Sy’s drama.

Along the way, Miller (and the audience) get a history lesson in the Communist China of the early 1980s, which was not the economic powerhouse of today but a poor country emerging from the radical experiments of its late founder and leader Mao Zedong. Ying and his wife, Wu Shiliang (Jo Chim), were victims of the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, that great levelling which sought to humble China’s artists and intellectuals by sending them off to cultivate rice paddies or raise pigs. Ying, who also spent a three-year stretch in prison, is still unnerved when he hears someone knocking on his door late at night.

Derek Kwan as Cao Yu (left) meets with Ying Ruocheng (Adrian Pang) in Salesman in China. Photo: David Hou

Now reinstated at the People’s Art Theatre, Ying has instigated the Salesman production in a bid to take advantage of the open-door policies of Mao’s reformist successor, Deng Xiaoping. But he still feels pressure from the government authorities, relayed by the theatre’s director general, the elderly playwright Cao Yu (Derek Kwan), who are more than a little doubtful of the enterprise.

During the course of rehearsals, Miller learns just how oppressive and absurd things were during the Cultural Revolution, which was overseen by Mao’s actress wife, the notorious Jiang Qing. She decreed that only the “Eight Permissible Plays”—approved works of Communist propaganda—could be performed in China’s theatres. Brodie and Sy give us a taste of them when a troupe of young Beijing opera performers invade the hall, clad as Red Army soldiers and dancing a ballet with rifles.

A Chinese opera troupe rehearses the Cultural Revolution-era ballet Red Detachment of Women in Salesman in China. Photo: David Hou

But the playwright also gets schooled on cultural insensitivity. Directing Salesman with an eye to Western-style realism, he comes up against Chinese theatrical tradition, most jarringly when he sees the “American” wigs and make-up created for the actors. To McCamus’s outraged Miller, they look grotesque and even racially offensive, akin to the West’s own “Oriental” and blackfaced minstrel stereotypes. Then, the distressed wigmaker (Derek Kwan) explains how lovingly he researched and built his wigs, his pride in his work a moving rebuke to the playwright’s hasty dismissal of time-honoured craftsmanship. It’s a great pause-taking moment, and one of several in which Brodie and Sy’s play resonates with the current, more diverse Western theatre scene, where long-held European attitudes are increasingly confronted with different cultures and their alternative approaches to storytelling.

Miller (Tom McCamus, second from left) confronts Ying (Adrian Pang, second from right) over wig and make-up choices in Salesman in China. Photo: David Hou

Throughout the rehearsal, bilingual Ying is often the interpreter between Miller, who doesn’t speak Mandarin, and the company, who mostly don’t speak English. (The show itself was in both languages, with large subtitles projected on a wide black strip below the actors as in a foreign-language film.) It’s part of Ying’s Herculean feat of multitasking, in which he not only has to deal with the authorities, placate Miller and explain things to the cast, but also has to act one of the toughest roles in the American canon.

This last task is the most psychologically demanding. Willy’s confrontations with Biff trigger Ying’s recollections of his own clash with his father, a professor who left for Taiwan in the wake of the 1949 Communist revolution, while Ying fatefully decided to throw in his lot with Mao’s regime. Brodie and Sy cleverly echo Miller’s own method in Death of a Salesman by having a distracted Ying, like the unmoored Willy Loman, drift off into memories in the middle of a scene.

Singaporean actor Pang was marvelous as Ying, giving a deeply felt performance. Grey-haired and harried, furiously chain-smoking, he often seemed to be carrying the weight of his responsibilities as if they were Willy’s iconic sample cases. In his anguished memories of parting with his father, or witnessing the brutality sanctioned by the Cultural Revolution, he became a figure as tragic in his own way as Miller’s salesman antihero.

Ying (Adrian Pang, right) relives a confrontation with his exiled father Ying Qianli (Derek Kwan, left) in Salesman in China. Photo: David Hou

As the 67-year-old Miller, McCamus, a Stratford Festival veteran, was no less superb, venting the vexations of a legendary but still active writer who suspects he’ll only be remembered for his early masterworks, Salesman and The Crucible—or for once being married to Marilyn Monroe. McCamus also made palpable Miller’s awkwardness as a cultural tourist in a country that frequently bedevils him.

Wu Shiliang rightly calls Death of a Salesman “a man’s play about men,” but Salesman in China gives equal time to the female perspective. Wu, played with admirable steeliness by Chim, is tougher and more pragmatic than her husband and, unlike him, doesn’t hesitate to cross swords with a provocative Miller. Inge Morath, Miller’s Austrian-born photographer wife (a cheerful but forthright Sarah Orenstein), is also quick to call out her husband’s American insensitivity.

Jo Chim as Wu Shiliang (left) and Sarah Orenstein as Inge Morath (second from right), in a scene from Salesman in China. Photo: David Hou

Sy directed the vibrant Stratford production, overseeing a twenty-member, predominantly Asian-Canadian ensemble. Among the excellent supporting players, Derek Kwan was the stand-out, nimbly juggling multiple roles, from the nervous Cao Yu and Ying’s reproving father, Ying Qianli, to the eloquent wigmaker and a playful kuaiban performer.

There is a joy underlying Salesman in China. Despite the language barrier and cultural differences, Ying, Miller and the company are united in the universal act of creating theatre. Brodie and Sy have also made it a personal breakthrough for Ying, who with Miller’s help channels his overwhelming emotions into his performance.

In the penultimate scene, when Ying makes Willy Loman’s first entrance on opening night, lugging those sample cases into his modest Brooklyn house, it takes on a new meaning. Willy’s defeated declaration to his wife Linda, “I came back,” now becomes, at the same time, Ying’s own triumphant statement—that of an actor who survived the madness of the Cultural Revolution to once again tread the boards of his Beijing theatre, in a role he was born to play.

Ying (Adrian Pang) enters as Willy Loman in Salesman in China. Photo: David Hou 

*Martin Morrow is a Past President of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association and a two-time winner of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Award for excellence in critical writing. He has served as chief theatre critic of the Calgary Herald (1988–2000), Fast Forward Weekly (2003–06) and The Grid (2011–14). Since 2010, he has been a theatre critic and arts writer for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.

Copyright © 2024 Martin Morrow
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411

Creative Commons Attribution International License

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.