"Salesman In China At The Stratford Festival" By Ontario Stage

The Stratford Festival has a major hit on its hands with the transcendent, Broadway-worthy world premiere of Salesman in China, by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy, directed by Sy. Now playing to full houses at the Avon Theatre, it is an imagined recreation of the events surrounding the production of Death of a Salesman in Beijing in 1983, directed by Arthur Miller himself and starring famed Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng.

The play is based on autobiographies of Miller and Ying, both of which have been added to my reading list. The playwrights are careful to note in the programme that, while the events presented are accurate, many interactions in Salesman in China have been imagined.

The play unfolds in both English and Mandarin and the stage has been raised several feet to accommodate a black strip on which subtitles in both languages are projected. It works surprisingly well, although the lady seated next to me had trouble reading them until she snagged a booster cushion at intermission. The vertically challenged should take note and request a booster on entering the theatre.

Salesman in China is set in 1983 when China, having suffered the two disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution under Mao, was coming to its senses under Deng Xiaoping and, as we can see in retrospect, taking the first tentative steps that would bring it to the brink of world domination today.

Part of that journey involved opening up to the rest of the world, allowing Ying (the astonishing Singaporean actor Adrian Pang) to realize one of his dreams, playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman under the direction of Arthur Miller (a towering Tom McCamus). As Ying says, if China is to be a great nation it must build bridges to other great nations.

As it turns out, it’s not that simple. A major theme is stated early when Miller brushes aside concerns about some of the cultural specifics of Death of a Salesman. At base, he explains, it’s a play about fathers and sons. Indeed, so is Salesman in China. But again, it’s not so simple.

Miller and Ying are depicted as committed artists with deep respect for each other but each has ghosts haunting him. For Ying it’s memories of having failed his father, a university professor who fled to Taiwan after the revolution and who appears mockingly to Ying throughout the play. As if that wasn’t bad enough he can’t shake the memory of Auntie Zhao (Harriet Chung), beaten by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution…

For the full review, see here.