dinosaurs
whatever happened to
willy loman?
by Douglas Messerli
Arthur
Miller Death of a Salesman / New
York, Ethel Barrymore Theater, the production I saw was the evening performance
of May 4, 2012
Today I have traveled to New York to spend a few minutes as a publisher
with my sales representatives, among the very last of that dinosaur species.
Within just a few years, as we know in our bones, all personal sales people
will have disappeared, to be replaced with the computer and other as yet
unimagined devices. Willy Loman must seem to most younger viewers—very few of
whom made up the audience of the Friday evening performance of Miller’s play—as
unrecognizable as a typewriter, an obsolete thing of a forgotten past, while
the Stanley Kowalskis of the world, outrageously larger-than-life second
generation immigrant Koreans, Armenians, Haitians, Mexicans, Russians, Indians,
Pakistanis and others—sexually dynamic men and women temporarily locked into
poverty—still exist in our cultures by the millions. One might simply summarize
the differences between these two mid-20th century US playwrights by
saying that while Miller focused on the aspirations of a man seeking a
petit-bourgeois existence, Williams—as always, embracing the wretchedly comic
outsiders—put all his chips on a man of sweat who preferred to bathe in the
sappy fizz of a beer while facing brutal reality.
I
suppose would I had been asked to sit down to dinner with either, I’d have chosen
Willy—which I almost felt I was doing in attending this production—who, after
all, was a courser version of my own father. But would I have been asked to go
to bed with either, I’d have jumped into the sack with Stanley, just like
Stella, in the blink of an eye—even if Marlon Brando weren’t playing the role
that night. And as far as I'm concerned, that is the important difference between
Miller's and William's visions of their relationship to their audiences.
*Some of these sentiments, particularly
regarding the disappearance of the middle class in relationship with Miller's
play where addressed in a New York Times op-ed
page essay by Lee Siegel on May 3, 2012, two days before I wrote this essay.
However, I did not have the opportunity to read Siegel's piece until after I
completed my essay, when, after sharing my sentiments with Susan Bee, she
pointed the similarities out to me.
the compromise
by Douglas Messerli
Gore
Vidal The Best Man / New York,
Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, the performance I saw was a matinee on May 5, 2012
The Best
Man is a
play of political demands, subterfuge, lies, blackmail, and, most importantly,
compromise—although the hero of Vidal’s witty political parable, William
Russell (John Larroquette), refuses compromise with his arch-enemy, Joe
Cantwell (Eric McCormack) or with his own conscience, and in that respect both
Cantwell and the out-going President Arthur Hockstader (James Earl Jones) are
correct in insisting that Russell is not a political beast!
The
compromise that Russell makes is a rare one for any political contender, sacrificing
his own career and his political battle for power for moral victory and,
possibly, a reaffirmation of his relationship with his wife.
In this star-studded revival of Gore Vidal’s 1960 comic-drama Candice Bergan, Kerry Butler, Angela Lansbury, and Jefferson Mays together with Larroquette, McCormack and Jones, act up a storm, somewhat cloaking the fact that, for all its noise and hoopla (the sound of booming applause of convention goers and cackling reporters being broadcast through the theater’s sound system even during intermissions) the play is really a series of drawing-room comedic skits of wit and bluff.
Like
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,
the revival of which I witnessed a night earlier, The Best Man encapsulates, moreover, a vision of a world that no
longer exists: the whirl of backroom politics, where decisions for party
nominations were played out in convention hotel suites, votes bought and sold
through a series of brokerings based on individual reputations smeared with
lies, rumor, scandal, and partial truths.
If,
given today’s preordained presidential campaigns where all has been
long-decided before the convention’s bland rhetorical flourishes and
flag-waving remonstrations, we might feel superior to the nasty bloodbaths of
earlier party gatherings, we might take note that, at least in Vidal’s fantasy,
politics still mattered and the individual candidates, freed from appealing to
the whole of the American populace, could at least imagine (even while
recognizing the reality was something far different) that their personal values
might matter.
Today
elections are won more on “general” appeal—which one might describe as
campaigns based on generalities and artful waffling as opposed to personal
integrity and individual history. One need only note how current Republican
candidate Romney attempts to cover over his own tracks regarding his
Massachusetts support of health coverage and silence his family roots in
Mexico—ancestors of his whom engaged in polygamy, or perceive Obama’s attempts
to downplay his Indonesian childhood and diminish his real accomplishments on
such issues as health care, currently unpopular with right-leaning independents
and aspects of which may soon be overturned by the Supreme court.
It
is true that in Vidal’s play both major candidates have something to hide:
Russell, his nervous breakdown and its attending medical history, as well as
the subsequent failure of his marriage;
Cantwell, his possible involvement in his young military days with a homosexual
roommate. But, in real terms, it hardly matters whether the latter was involved
in sexual acts or in merely squealing on his roommate, for in the context of
the play either demonstrates his moral hypocrisy and his commitment to “the
ends justifying the means.” Russell’s bout with mental exhaustion, it is clear,
has little to do with his career, including in his more recent performance as
Secretary of State, and, in reality, may simply indicate his inability to
accept simple solutions to complex issues. And both men, despite their real and
implicated blackmail, still stake their claims on their political actions and
personal values reflected in their public service. While Cantwell’s politics
are ruthless, opportunistic, and play directly to the most ignorant elements of
public perception, he is nevertheless a man of action, a true political beast
who will clearly accomplish whatever he sets out to do. Despite Russell’s
superior sense of ethics and his erudite comprehension of American and world
history, he is, as his campaign advisor and the current President point out, a
man who when faced with critical choices, wavers—or, to express it another way,
is a man who stops to think before acting— a fatal flaw, evidently, for any
leader.
While one might be tempted to compare Vidal’s rivals with today’s
presidential candidates, accordingly, Obama is no Russell, despite his
intelligent projection of moral issues, just as Romney is no Cantwell, despite
his obviously expedient shifts to the far right in order to appeal
to those constituents. We
live today in a time where everything is far more prepackaged and,
consequently, morally blurred.
The
politics of Vidal’s parable, represented by the enormous compromise of
candidate Russell, are no longer possible in our society of political and
social extremes. As in the Miller play, I suspect, very few members of the
audience under sixty—none of whom I spotted at the Schoenfeld matinee I
attended—might have difficultly comprehending a drama so centered on one man’s
moral scruples. When did morality and politics ever share the same bed? today’s
voters might scoff. While in 1960 Vidal might have pointed to John Kennedy
(even if mistakenly), today we have “hot mic” statements from our President
admitting to Russian President Medvedev that during the election he needs the
“flexibility” of not saying what he eventually might. And anyone reading the
daily papers perceives that even expediently political compromises rarely occur
in the chambers of congress. The idea morality today often has little to do
with a truly thought-out position. A man like Vidal’s Russell, sad to say, is
either a political dinosaur or a literary fabrication at best. And a man of
compromise, as Republic Senator Dick Lugar's defeat yesterday confirmed, is
someone who cannot be reelected.
New
York, Minetta Tavern, May 6, 2012; Los Angeles, May 8, 2012
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