BY ELEANOR BURGESS DIRECTED BY MARTI LYONS SEPTEMBER 27 – NOVEMBER 6, 2022 | STIEMKE STUDIO www.MilwaukeeRep.com | 414-224-9490
2 Wife of a Salesman – PlayGuide Mark Clements ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Chad Bauman EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR PLAYGUIDE WRITTEN BY Lindsey Hoel-Neds CONTENT WRITER PLAYGUIDE EDITED BY Deanie Vallone DRAMATURG, WIFE OF A SALESMAN Lisa Fulton CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER SEPTEMBER 27 – NOVEMBER 6, 2022 | STIEMKE STUDIO Executive Producers Julia & Bladen Burns • Ellen & Jim Flesch Produced in Association with Writers Theatre A John (Jack) D. Lewis New Play Development Program Production The Stiemke Studio Season is presented by Four-Four Foundation About the Play...............................................................3 A Quick Primer on Death of a Salesman...............4 Linda Loman and Strong Women in Arthur Miller’s Dramas..........................................5 Women’s Roles in the 1950s....................................6 The Madonna-Whore Dichotomy and I ts Hold on Culture.............................................7 Reinvented Classics in Contemporary Theater..............................................8 Q&A with Playwright Eleanor Burgess.........................................................10 Table of Contents By Eleanor Burgess | Directed by Marti Lyons
Amanda Drinkall (The Mistress) and Kate Fry (The Wife) in the Writer’s Theatre production of Wife of a Salesman. Photo credit: Michael Brosilow.
About The Play
A woman who is living her life on her own terms, or the terms she’s allowed by the times in which she lives. A working woman who prides herself on her appearance and uses her physicality and personality to find what she needs in this world that would discount her value.
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The stereotypical put-upon American housewife of days gone by. She has given up any dreams for herself in service of her family and husband. Is sick of being cast aside for other women and other priorities by her salesman husband.
The Mistress
The Wife
What would happen if the women in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman were prioritized, and actually met each other? In this play, an unnamed 1950s housewife travels to confront one of her husband’s mistresses from his time on the road as a traveling salesman. Through this meeting, the women discover things about themselves, their dreams, their roles in both society and the life of the man they share, and who they might be to each other and to the world if circumstances and the times were different.
play has long been seen as one of the masterworks of American drama and an insightful examination of the American Dream. The play persists as one of the most performed dramas, holding a mirror up to society and identity for audience members around the world.
Miller’sbe.
A Quick Primer on Death of a Salesman
4 Wife of a Salesman – PlayGuide
Happy. As he comes to more and more understanding of his own mediocrity, he regresses into memories of dreams of what once was and what he thought he might someday
The Loman family grapples with their relationships with each other and Willy’s delusions of what his life could have been. Willy Loman is not the successful, “well-liked” man and ideal father he always imagined himself to be. Fifteen years before the events of the current time of the play, Willy had an affair on the road, which colors many aspects of his life. His shortcomings have had negative effects on his relationships with his wife, Linda, and his sons, Biff and
Photos on this page: Bottom: Lee E. Ernst, Reese Madigan; Laura Gordon, and Gerard Neugent in Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s 2010/11 production of Death of a Salesman. Photo credit: Michael Brosilow, Milwaukee Rep. Inset: Sharon D. Clarke and Wendell Pierce in the Young Vic Production of Death of a Salesman. Photo credit: New York Times
Death of a Salesman, from which Wife of a Salesman derives its name and inspiration, is a 1949 drama by American playwright Arthur Miller. The play explores loss of identity and the main character’s dissatisfaction with his changing life, dreams, and society. Through a montage of memories, arguments, and dreams, the last day of Willy Loman’s life and his whole existence thus far is examined.
“Willy, dear. I can’t cry. Why did you do it? I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy . . . . We’re free. We’re free . . . We’re free.”
Photos
Several articles have been written in the past few years about the women in Miller’s plays and how audiences should re-examine them in a new light. Miller himself downplayed his understanding of women, and his own failings in relationships can be seen in many of his characters. But, while the men are the main characters, the women are often the ones who survive, the ones who are strong, the ones who carry on.
wonder why she stays with a man who has not only been unfaithful, but who keeps her so sidelined in his view that he is “the main character” in their lives. Linda lives in a time when being divorced was frowned upon and her choices were limited; she also truly loves her husband even with his many shortcomings. As an audience, we might be able to see Linda’s life taking a whole new direction after Willy’s death, especially as she shares in the last lines of the play:
In Wife of a Salesman, Burgess supposes that the two women who appear in Death of a Salesman meet and have deep discussions that they are not allowed in Miller’s original play. The majority of scholarship on Miller’s work focuses on the men in his plays; indeed, many have even highlighted the fact that his works are “men’s plays.” The women in Miller’s plays are not to be discounted, even if he often did so himself. While the character that is known as “The Mistress” is not given much space in Miller’s play, Linda Loman is a more central character than she is often given credit for.
on this page: Top: Catherine Combs, Ian Bedford, and Andrus Nichols in A View From the Bridge, Goodman Theatre, 2017. Photo credit: Goodman Theatre. Bottom: Tracy Letts and Annette Bening in the 2019 Broadway revival of All My Sons. Photo credit: Joan Marcus.
Linda Loman and Strong Women in Arthur Miller’s Dramas
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Linda Loman is the center of her family, she is the strength in the Loman world. When Willy is falling apart and seeing his life as hopeless, Linda is the one who keeps everything going. While Willy’s memories show how much their sons doted on their father, Linda was the one keeping the home and taking care of the boys as Willy traveled for work. This “woman as the heart of the home” narrative was a common idea during the time in which Miller wrote the play, but Linda embodies a fortitude for which she is not always given credit.
It is sometimes hard for us as contemporary audiences to see the relationship between Linda and Willy and not
shunned for their sexual choices. There was no viable birth control option at the time, so many young women found themselves with unwanted pregnancies.
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Women’s Roles 1950sthein
Happy Homemakers
One of the main themes of Cold War propaganda was the wholesome American nuclear family as opposed to the sad and destitute Communist families in the U.S.S.R. American women were shown as lovely and maintaining beautiful families, while Russian women were shown in rags working in factories with their children. Having a family was considered a patriotic and personal duty.
Bouncing Babies . . . But Only if You’re Married!
The ideal of a stay-at-home mother, tending to her husband and children’s every need, was a pervasive image in the media of the time. Many women felt pressured to maintain a beautiful domestic life and women who took on employment outside the home for fulfillment instead of financial need were thought to be selfish and putting themselves above their family.
1950s advertisement for Pep vitamins. Photo credit: dakrolak.wordpress.com.
While Death of a Salesman was first performed in 1949, the stringent gender norms and expectations placed on Linda Loman were reflective of a post-war sensibility that saw the U.S. focusing on the nuclear family and women as the heart of a happy home.
Women in the 1950s felt tremendous pressure to get married and much of the cultural stereotype of college women was that they went not to further their education, but to secure a husband. Marriage rates were at an all-time high and couples were marrying younger, right out of high school or during college. While employment rates for women also grew during the decade, the media and pop culture tended to focus on marriage and family life.
Contrary to the push for motherhood within a marriage, pregnancy outside of wedlock was considered incredibly shameful. Single pregnant women and girls often found themselves “sent away” to have their babies and were
Propaganda, Patriotism, and Progeny
Getting Her M.R.S.
Having children was expected for married couples and a majority of young wives were pregnant less than a year from their wedding day. Between the years of 1940 and 1960, the number of families with three or four children doubled and quadrupled, respectively.
because of her prudish nature, but she is also the moral center of the play. Abigail wields immense power in the play, but is portrayed as the villain, while Elizabeth’s purity and goodness is meant to be admired even in the face of Whiledeath.
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Photos on this page: Top: Kim Novak’s dual characters in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Photo Credit: LovelyRita blog. Bottom: Kate Fry and Amanda Drinkall in the Writers Theatre production of Wife of a Salesman. Photo credit: Michael Brosilow.
In Miller’s original play, only Linda, Willy Loman’s wife, is given a name and a complex life. His mistress is not given a name or much dimensionality beyond being a woman who uses her sexuality to get gifts and favors from men. In Burgess’ play, “The Mistress” is the first character we meet and she has much more dimension and agency than she does in Miller’s drama. “The Wife”, or proxy for Linda Loman, questions her role as the perfect wife and mother at the expense of her own satisfaction.
The Madonna/Whore Dichotomy and Its Hold on Culture
The literary trope of the “Madonna/Whore” or “Virgin/ Whore” dichotomy is a simple one: women are either wanton sexual beings constantly tempting men and are only worthy of lust, or virginal and pure angels of domesticity and goodness who are worthy of love. This patriarchal structure that appears not only in art and literature, but also in societal expectations placed upon women, is pervasive. Of course, many writers have upended or questioned this motif in their work, including Eleanor Burgess in this play. We see “The Wife” and “The Mistress” as the embodiments of these two archetypes, but are they really?
This dichotomy also appears in another of Miller’s most well-known plays, The Crucible. In the play, the teenage Abigail Williams is portrayed as a beautiful temptress, vying for the affections of the married John Proctor. Her foil, Elizabeth Proctor, is portrayed as a cold woman whose husband is forced into the fiery young Abigail’s arms
Miller and Burgess’ use of this dichotomy are most relevant to Wife of a Salesman, the literary trope is one that goes back hundreds of years. Whether looking at biblical women such as the Virgin Mary versus the cultural image of Jezebel, or at more contemporary portrayals in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or the films of Alfred Hitchcock, this trope is pervasive. So pervasive in fact, that psychoanalytic theory has named a complex after the idea: the Madonna-Whore Complex exists when a man cannot perform sexually in a loving relationship because it goes against his views of pure women being chaste instead of sexual beings.
Pamela Reed in Becky Nurse of Salem at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Photo credit: Kevin Berne, Berkeley Rep.
8 Wife of a Salesman – PlayGuide
This play follows Becky, a descendent of accused witch Rebecca Nurse, a real person, and character in Miller’s The Crucible Becky works at the local Salem witch museum and seems to be plagued by bad luck. Becky turns to a local witch for help and things take a darkly comedic turn.
Contemporary Theater
A legendary stage actress hires her Hollywood director husband to revive The Crucible on Broadway. He casts a YouTube star as Abigail Williams, and her Gen Z sense of justice leads her to question the misogyny of Miller and his play, throwing the production into jeopardy. Abigail questions whether the art and artist can or should be separated and how intergenerational power and values factor into relationships between women.
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Reading of Abigail by Sarah Tuft. Photo credit: sarahtuft.com
power, sex
John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower John Proctor is the Villain, a contemporary high school class in Appalachia explores The Crucible Due to events and a scandal in the community, study of the text becomes uncomfortable and eerily The line between witch and heroine blurs as the play examines education, and relationships.
relevant.
Reinvented Classics in
Abigail by Sarah Tuft
In
Becky Nurse of Salem by Sarah Ruhl
Jordan Slattery, Miranda Rizzolo, and Deidre Staples in John Proctor Is the Villain at Studio Theatre. Photo credit: Margot Schulman, Studio Theatre.
Stupid F*king Bird by Aaron Posner
Grant Goodman, Marti Gobel, James T. Alfred, and Greta Wohlrabe in Clybourne Park at Milwaukee Rep. Photo credit: Michael Brosilow.
Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris
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A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath
In this contemporary adaptation of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, playwright and director Con is struggling to write a new play. As he tries to create his new masterwork for his actress girlfriend, Nina, his aging Hollywood starlet mother becomes an interfering presence in the process. As Con questions the art of previous generations and tries to pursue his own, comedyensues.JosephEstlack,
El Beh, Charles Shaw Robinson, Carrie Paff, and Johnny Moreno in Stupid F*king Bird at San Francisco Playhouse. Photo credit: Jessica Palopoli, San Francisco Playhouse.
In this sequel to Ibsen’s classic drama, protagonist Nora Helmer returns fifteen years after leaving her stifling life behind. Nora has become a successful novelist, but the one thing she needs is an official divorce. Before she can get the signatures from Torvald that she needs, she must answer the queries of those she left behind.
In this partner to A Raisin in the Sun, playwright Bruce Norris places the action in the home that the Younger family is buying in 1959. The play introduces the current owners of the home, Russ and Bev, a white couple who have lost their son. Their neighbor arrives to tell them that he’s tried to buy off the Younger family to keep the Black family from buying the house. The second act of the play jumps fifty years into the future, when Clybourne park has become a mostly Black neighborhood and a young white couple wants to come in and tear down the home to build something new. The play examines racism, classism, and gentrification.
Julie White and Stephen McKinley Henderson in A Doll’s House, Part 2 on Broadway. Photo credit: Sara Krulwich, The New York Times.
their wants or their pain. And that’s fine, every playwright is interested in what they’re interested in. But when you have a play occupying such a huge place in the canona play that is considered THE definition of great American drama, THE definitive examination of the American Dream… that has a major effect on whose stories we think have weight, whose story we think is the “American” story, and whose feelings and needs are worthy of attention and care.
What inspired you to write this story?
Q&A
How do you think overexpectations/rolesgenderhavechangedtime?Howhavetheynot?
I love Arthur Miller’s work. There’s no arguing with the fact that he was brilliant, both at analyzing American society and at crafting profound, wrenching drama. But I do think there’s an irony to his work, that’s encapsulated in the famous quote “attention must be paid.” Miller lavishes such wonderful, thoughtful attention on Willy Loman - he has such deep empathy for this limited and ordinary man. But he has much less interest in his female characters. Linda is a deep character, but her feelings are not central, not the thing “attention must be paid” to; with other female characters, including “The Woman,” Miller has no interest in
I first read Death of a Salesman as a teenager, when I didn’t get it at all, and then read it for the second time in graduate school, when I admired it as a brilliantly crafted play. But I didn’t really connect with it on a personal level until I brought it along on a trip I was taking with my Mom, and my Mom read it, and said, “You know this is basically the story of our family, right?” And I had known that my grandfather was a salesman in Brooklyn in the years after World War II, but I hadn’t known many details, in particular about his marriage to my grandmother, which was loving but also turbulent. And that made me start thinking about my grandmother, who was someone who absolutely adored the theater and movies, but who (unlike me) never got to tell her own story. I started thinking about all the missing narratives... and about what happens to our understanding of society and our understanding of ourselves when the canon only includes some voices and not others. And that made me want to rip the canon open and force my way in.
Do you like Arthur Miller’s work? What issues do you see with his plays that we as contemporary audiences should examine?
Haha, I think my answer to that question is at least 90 minutes long, and it happens in the play! Or, that’s a question the whole play invites audiences to think about. Obviously life has changed enormously for women (and men) since my grandmothers’ time, and mostly for the better. I went to a college that would not have admitted my grandmothers, and have a job that maybe 2-3 women used to get to have per decade, let alone per season. At
Eleanor Burgess with Playwright
10 Wife of a Salesman – PlayGuide
the time the play takes place, women couldn’t even open a bank account without their husband’s permission. So, things have changed. And they haven’t. You can look at the “second shift,” at Dobbs v. Jackson, at your own life, and see that our different expectations for women and men still permeate almost every aspect of our lives.
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major things happened - I had a baby in 2019, and Covid hit in 2020. And like many women, I suddenly found myself with no childcare, stuck inside my house, taking care of the kid while my husband worked. Basically living the same life as my grandmothers. And that cracked something open for me, and a new, very different draft came out of that experience. And I was so lucky to then
A lot of my work seems to focus on that idea of narratives - canonical narratives, and what gets left out. I was actually a latecomer to theater; I majored in history as an undergrad, and I was a high school history teacher for several years after college. So, the idea of the stories we inherit about our past, and how they shape our present, is an obsession for me. I’m also very interested in exploding stories we think we know, taking familiar time periods or relationships and turning them around and around until the world starts to feel very, very complicated. I think this play is also pretty typical of my work in tone - namely, that its subject is very serious but the experience of watching it is very, very funny. I always hope that an Eleanor Burgess play means that an audience has a great time watching it, and then leaves with a lot to think about. Hopefully that was people’s experience with The Niceties and hopefully that’s what we’re doing again here.
learn that Milwaukee Rep and Writers Theatre would both produce the play. That was such a lifeline, in the middle of the early days of the pandemic, when I had no idea when or whether theater would ever come back. That kept me working, and pushing forward, towards a newer, deeper version of this story.
What was the process of development of the play like? Can you walk audiences through it a bit?
This play has had a long road, and each step along it has enriched it. I wrote the first draft in 2017 - that was before the pandemic, obviously, and also before I had kids. It was a simpler version of the play. I won’t spoil the twist here, but there’s a big twist that didn’t exist in the first draft. I was fortunate enough to have a commission from Milwaukee Rep, in association with Writers Theatre in Chicago, to support my working on the play, and I was able to workshop and hone it here in Milwaukee. And it was getting stronger and stronger, but something was
It can be a really long road, to write something that’s worthy of people’s time and work and attention. I was so lucky to have support along the way from Milwaukee Rep.
How does this connect to your other work or other interests as a playwright?
Bottom: Kimber Sprawl and Kate Levy in The Niceties during Milwaukee Rep’s 2019-2020 season. Photo credit: Michael Brosilow.
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I think one other question the play is asking is, have we just replaced hyper-feminized expectations of women with masculinized expectations, or with expecting women to do everything? I certainly don’t want to be Linda Loman - but I also don’t want to be Willy Loman, basing my sense of self worth on how much money I bring in. And I don’t want to have to be simultaneously Linda and Willy, a perfect mom AND a striving worker. That’s just exhausting. And I think we’re seeing that everywhere right now. Mass burnout, and a sense that this is all unsustainable. That “having it all” just means “doing it all.” Am I glad I exist now, instead of a hundred years ago? Absolutely. But I hope for better things for my kids, and for anyone growing up a hundred years from now.
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✯ Provide a richer theater experience by hosting Rep-in-Depth, TalkBacks, and creating PlayGuides to better inform our audiences about our productions;
MILWAUKEE REP RECEIVES SUPPORT FROM:
✯ Maintain our commitment to audiences with special needs through our Access Services that include American Sign Language interpreted productions, captioned theater, infrared listening systems and script synopses to ensure that theater at The Rep is accessible to all;
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Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Patty and Jay Baker Theater Complex is located in the Associated Bank River Center downtown at the corner of Wells and Water Streets. The building was formerly the home of the Electric Railway and Light Company.
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✯ Educate over 21,000 students at 150+ schools in the greater Milwaukee area with Rep Immersion Day experiences, student matinees, workshops, tours and by making connections with their school curriculum through classroom programs such as Reading Residencies;
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✯ Educate the next generation of theater professionals with our EPR Program which gives newly degreed artists a chance to hone their skills at The Rep as they begin to pursue their theatrical careers.
We value our supporters and partnerships and hope that you will help us to expand the ways Milwaukee Rep has a positive impact on theater and on our Milwaukee community.
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