Death of a Salesman

Simon Stone, the resident director of Belvoir St. Theatre, an Australian company, jumped head first into a pail of boiling oil when he took it upon himself to rewrite "Death of a Salesman." Not only did he cut the play's epilogue, but he altered the manner in which Willy Loman, Arthur Miller's protagonist, meets his death. In the original play, Willy dies in a car crash that may or may not have been intentional; in Mr. Stone's staging, he commits suicide by gassing himself. On top of that, Belvoir neglected to inform ICM Partners, the agency that represents Mr. Miller's estate and licenses his plays for production around the world, that Mr. Stone was altering the script.

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Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller on the set of 'Death of a Salesman,' 1949.

Whoops.

No sooner did ICM get wind of the changes than Belvoir was informed that if the company didn't perform "Death of a Salesman" in its entirety—complete with epilogue—the production would be shut down. (Nothing was said about Willy's suicide.) Mr. Stone agreed to cooperate, though not before waving the Australian flag to spectacularly irrelevant effect: "Until recently we accepted the Broadway or West End way of treating their classics, now we are bringing to them an Australian sensibility and technique. The world is responding."

Theater is about what works onstage, and not having seen Belvoir's production, I can't tell you whether it works better to drop the curtain after Willy takes the gas pipe. What I do know is that there's nothing even slightly surprising about ICM's absolute refusal to let Mr. Stone scrap the final scene of "Death of a Salesman." Few playwrights take kindly to such directorial monkeyshines. Edward Albee is famous (or notorious, whichever you prefer) for pulling the plug on productions that don't suit him. Likewise Samuel Beckett, whose estate still requires theaters to perform his work exactly as written, not excluding the stage directions. And Bruce Norris, the author of "Clybourne Park," was so angry when he learned that Berlin's Deutsches Theater planned to do the play with a white actor wearing blackface that he "retracted" the company's performance rights, forcing it to scrap the production.

Should it be? It is, after all, perfectly commonplace for directors to "rewrite" Shakespeare, both by cutting his plays (many of which are, like "Hamlet," too long to be comfortably performed in their entirety) and by updating their settings, at times almost beyond recognition. The same is true in the world of opera. When Francesca Zambello staged "Billy Budd," Benjamin Britten's operatic version of Herman Melville's novel about life aboard the battleship HMS Indomitable, for Houston Grand Opera in 1998, she described the production to me in four crisp words: "No boat, no uniforms." It worked, too.Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder's literary executor, is far more willing to give directors creative leeway to experiment with his uncle's work. Among other things, he allowed one troupe, Two River Theater Company of Red Bank, N.J., to use bunraku-style puppets to play several of the supporting characters in "Our Town." But he, too, draws the line at out-and-out rewriting—and because "Our Town," like "Godot" and "Death of a Salesman," is still protected by copyright, his word is law.

Such productions, when done well, can offer fresh and illuminating perspectives on overfamiliar masterpieces—so long as their creators believe in the underlying validity of the original text. But whenever you deviate from that text, you run the risk of twisting, even perverting its meaning. Look at what happened to "Our Town" when Sam Wood adapted it for the screen in 1940. With the author's presumably grudging approval, Mr. Wood grafted a Hollywood ending (Emily doesn't die) onto the wrenching graveyard scene. Any modern-day director who tried such a thing would surely be greeted at the stage door with well-aged tomatoes.
At the same time, I also think that Messrs. Albee, Beckett and Miller would be better served if they and their posthumous representatives would lighten up and let directors, Mr. Stone included, do their damnedest. No, I don't want to see "Willy Loman, Killer of Zombies" on Broadway any time this millennium, but I do believe that great works of art can profit from radical reinterpretations that fling conventional wisdom out the window. A classic, after all, is tough enough to stand up to the hardest possible use. In the long run, the only thing that can do lasting damage to the reputation of a masterpiece is to let contemporary audiences take its excellence for granted. The trick is to make it new.