It turned out the native cast had never heard of traveling salesmen, life insurance, or football which they mixed up with soccer with which they were more familiar. Julia Gu as Designer Huang and Claire Hsu as the Woman from Boston in a scene from Jeremy Tiang’s “Salesman 之死” at the Connelly Theatre (Photo credit: Maria Baranova) Aside from the exploration of Miller and the cast into the now classic 1949 American play from the point of view of characterizations and motivations, Salesman 之死 I recounts instances of the mainly understandable misunderstandings and confusions among the Chinese cast about American life as well as their amusement at Miller’s mistakes about Chinese culture. What is so memorable about the play is that while the book was told from Miller’s perspective as an American visitor who didn’t speak the language, Salesman 之死 I is told from the point of view of Translator Shen Huihui, a 27-year-old Peking University professor of American literature who had never been to the United States, and updates the story to the present revealing how the production changed her life. Featuring an all-female cast, the play is in both English and Mandarin with both languages subtitled on three walls of the thrust stage that has been created at the Connelly Theatre which usually features a proscenium stage. The play is a fascinating, enlightening and entertaining account of the six- week rehearsal period and other events that Miller attended while in Beijing through opening night on May 7, 1983. The result, Salesman 之死 I produced by Yangtze Repertory Theatre in association with Gung Ho Projects, is now on display at the Connelly Theatre in a sold out production currently running through October 28.Ĭlaire Hsu as Happy, Julia Gu as Biff, Sandia Ang as Linda and Lydia Jialu Li as Willy Loman in a scene from Jeremy Tiang’s “Salesman 之死” at the Connelly Theatre (Photo credit: Maria Baranova) They also interviewed surviving members of the production as to their memories and thoughts of that time. The following year, he published a book Salesman in Beijing with photographs by his wife Inge Morath as a sort of diary-memoir describing the day to day rehearsals as well as the events of his stay.ĭirector Michael Leibenluft and playwright Jeremy Tiang got together in 2017 with a group of bilingual theater makers under the auspices of Leibenluft’s Gung Ho Projects to explore turning the 1983 Beijing production into a theater piece in both English and Mandarin. In 1983 American playwright Arthur Miller who knew no Chinese was famously invited to Beijing to direct the first production of his Pulitzer Prize winning play Death of a Salesman translated into Mandarin.

The death of a salesman plot points