Death of a Salesman

The Mike Nichols production of Death of a Salesman is the best Broadway play I expect to see during my time in law school. After waiting for two hours, I successfully rushed a pair of thirty dollar student tickets this past Friday.

I had heard good things about the production, but didn't expect to connect to the material in a very meaningful way since I am a Miller novice. After seeing the terribly staged mid-century play, Look Back Jin Anger, a couple days ago, I was worried that I was in store for athree our snoozefest. sitting down in a partial view box seat with my friend as the curtain went up, I was also skeptical of the casting. Though I love Philip Seymour Hoffman, isnt he a bit too young to play Willy Loman, the sixty year old salesman drifting into senility? His sons, Biff and Happy, the inheritors of his hopes and dreams, are portrayed by the too-young looking Andrew Garfield and Finn Wittrock.

But ten minutes on, I was hooked. Philip Seymour Hoffman carries his heft around convincingly as a man who has eaten unhealthily for thirty five years as a traveling salesman. He first enters the stage, muttering "boy oh boy" quietly, after returning early from a failed sales trip. There's no sense that he's aware of an audience, but rather is just inside his own head. When his wife, Linda (Linda Emond) hears him shuffling around, she comes and persuades him to go to bed in the manner of the lifelong partner who just wants to make things easier for her husband near the end.

As a first time viewer of any production of the play, I was also drawn in by the writing and the plot. set in the 1940s, Miller's story is eerily resonant today. People of Willy Loman's age were the most susceptible to losing their jobs during the recent recession, no matter how loyal they were to the firm for the past thirty five years. I know many Biffs today--though generally from more affluent families--whom, having been raised by the school of self esteem, now find themselves unable to do anything. But the story is both general and specific.

Despite the global issues it addresses, Death of Salesman focuses on one specific family. Though everyone can relate to Willy's tendency to ask what could have been had he taken a different road, his plight is unique. We see Willy's life and motives through the hallucinated conversations he has with his brother (John Glover), a man who had gone to Alaska to make his fortune off the land. Now Willy, overweight and tied to the trappings of a middle class existence--- nice house in Brooklyn, a refrigerator, and other appliances--he wonders if should have gone the way of the other Loman and inhabited a new frontier.

The play's success must ultimately be attributed to the Mike Nichols, the director. Though I'm new to Miller, there were several scenes that were conducive to melodrama. Many scenes where people could be yelling at each other are toned down to reveal several notes of both disappointment and anger. The only person who overacts at times is Andrew Garfield, who shakes his head in anger a few too many times in the final twenty minutes of the play.

Death of a Salesman is a must see show. My only regret is that I hadn't seen other productions to compare it to.

Why is Everyone Mad at Mike Daisey?

Mike Daisey has been pilloried in the press lately for making false statements on This American Life recently. Daisy, a monologist, wrote and starred in the immensely popular The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which debuted at the Woolly Mammoth in DC last year and went on to achieve great success at the Public Theater in New York. The Agony and Ecstasy is a one-man show about the factory workers at the Chinese Apple supplier, Foxconn. Daisey tells his story in the first person relaying things that he supposedly saw first hand when he went to ShenZhen, China. Some of this show was excerpted in This American Life in January.

But last week, This American Life aired an hour-long retraction of Mike Daisey's segment. Apparently, Daisey hadn't experienced many of the things he said he had, including meeting many under aged workers, workers who had been poisoned by n-hexane, nearly driving off an incomplete bridge with his translator, and even going into the factory dorms with his translator.

When This American's Life retraction episode went live, the mainstream media's judgment came swiftly and harshly. Far too harsh, in my opinion. Most of the criticism focuses on Daisey's representation that he was telling the literal truth both onstage and off. Ira Glass really hands it to Daisy in the retraction episode, asking him why he "lied." The New York Times' theater critic, Charles Isherwood wrote "I certainly believed that the stories Mr. Daisey told — of seeing guards with guns at the Foxconn factory, of interviewing a 13-year-old girl who worked at the factory, of talking to an elderly former Foxconn worker whose hand had been destroyed — were true."

I'm not surprised that the media has been so critical. After all, they are all journalists and editors. The part former (current?) aspiring journalist part of me does think what Daisey did failed to meet journalistic standards. I couldn't imagine telling an editor "Yes, I saw this," or "Yes, he said this," if I indeed hadn't seen those things first hand. I also agree with the Slate Culture Gabfest that it's pretty reprehensible of Daisey to "play fast and loose" with the lives of Chinese workers--the exact people he says he's trying to help.

But is what Mike Daisey did so bad when seen from the audience's perspective? I don't think so. As Isherwood admits himself, we don't expect documentarians with an agenda to take an evenhanded approach. I saw Daisey's monologue in the same way. He clearly has an agenda to criticize Apple's standards for factory conditions. The monologue also starts with a guilt-tripping segment about him being the world's biggest Apple fan. Who in Twenty-First Century America can't relate to that? Indeed, whenever I turn on This American Life and they have people like Mike Birbiglia telling stories based on their own lives, I assume some of the dialogue to be made up or exaggerated. Even when reading John Jeremiah Sullivan's recent collection, Pulphead, I took some if his exact quotes from interesting characters he meets in his essays with a grain of salt. The point is to get at a larger truth rather than retain the accuracy of specific details. As consumers, we also rely on the marketplace of ideas for different views. For a Chinese perspective on factory workers, see the documentary, Last Train Home.

What makes this issue particular interesting to me right now is that I'm also seeing it from a legal perspective. My media law class has me thinking about what the WBEZ/This American Life legal counsel must think about Mike Daisey's misrepresentations. In general, media outlets are liable for defamation in American courts only if the statement is defamatory, false and done with malice for a public figure. For a private figure, the plaintiff must show that the statement is false and defamatory only. In this case, we certainly have a public figure in both Foxconn and Apple. The representations about the factory workers are hardly facts directly about Apple. In other words, despite being riddled with lies, it would be difficult for someone to bring a defamation suit here. (This does highlight an interesting question of whether journalistic standards are higher than legal standards, and whether they should be, but we'll save that for another time.)

If it makes a good story for the audience, and doesn't really seem to be that damaging from a legal perspective, why is everyone so mad at Mike Daisey? Because Daisey hits two nerves at once. First, he seems incredibly lazy, and ended up hurting his cause. Second, he raises the question of what our standards for creative non fiction in an age where many journalists have a tendency to bring themselves into their stories. Daisey is lazy because he wanted a good story, but didn't dig around enough for the story. He probably could have found some underage workers if he tried to. And now his controversy is overshadowing the original story.

But what is really irking people, I suspect, is that it highlights the agony and ecstasy of creative non fiction. What exactly is "truth" when it comes to creative non fiction? Should we even care? This is a huge issue now when more writers are inserting themselves in their works, blurring the line between opinion and fact. The other anxiety-causing thing is that anyone these days can practice "journalism" on a blog. They aren't investing millions of dollars into fact checking everything. The large media companies are the ones who have the most to lose if the floodgates open to allow everyone to exaggerate facts. They would rather readers not expose themselves to ideas in the marketplace, and instead just go to them for having a monopoly on "the truth."

This whole debacle hasn't really changed my mind about Mike Daisey, This American Life, or theater. But I'll worry about artists sacrificing truth for fact in the future.