Theatre in Review: Salesman (Yangtze Repertory Theatre/Connelly Theater) Sometimes a playwright blindsides you, so slyly is he laying the groundwork for a transcendent moment. Jeremy Tiang's new play is about the famous 1983 Beijing production of Death of a Salesman, a key cultural and political event of the decade, with playwright Arthur Miller on hand to deliver his seal of approval. It represents a kind of global turning point: Mao is dead, Deng Xiaoping is in power, and China, for the first time in decades, is tentatively looking to the West. The success of Miller's play is not foretold, however. The cast, assembled for the first read-through at Beijing People's Art Theatre, is enthusiastic but out of their collective depth. Adopting the local performance style, the reading proceeds glacially, clocking in at four hours. (Already, everyone is wondering how they will get home after the buses stop running.) It's a daunting task -- the early rehearsals are less than promising -- but everyone applies him or herself, determined to succeed even as Miller, his frustrations mounting, pushes them to do better. (Unhappy with their slow, stylized approach, he plays for them an archival recording of the original cast, urging them to adopt the clattering rhythms of New Yorkers' speech, but it's an uphill battle.) Then, out of nowhere, magic happens: Working through the terrible climactic showdown between Willy Loman and his son Biff, the performance acquires velocity, bite, and real tears and anger. The actors have cleared a seemingly insuperable barrier, seizing control of another culture's writing, staying true to it yet making it their own. Suddenly, I had tears in my eyes. It's a doubly surprising moment because, up to this point, Salesman struck me as a gentle culture-clash comedy, charming and observant, if not terribly urgent. In fact, Tiang is, carefully, almost surreptitiously, detailing a unique, once-in-an-era situation, in which people from wildly different worlds struggle to understand each other, making sure that we care very much about the outcome. Many of the challenges are linguistic: At that first reading, the play's title is mistranslated as Death of a Salesclerk. (At certain moments, Salesman resembles Chinglish, David Henry Hwang's comedy of East -- West misunderstanding.) But there are political and cultural divides, too: "What is a salesman?" wonders the production designer. "The script doesn't actually explain," he muses before concluding that Willy must own a market stall somewhere. The size of the refrigerator in the Loman house is a matter of consternation to the Chinese, who don't believe such hulking products exist. Tiang has plenty of fun with this often-halting exercise in international relations. Miller, attending a production of a People's Art Theatre classic (now in its thirtieth year, featuring members of the original cast), congratulates the actors, commenting, "It was, um, more incest than I was expecting." Disappointment is expressed that Miller is accompanied by his wife, Inge Morath, not Marilyn Monroe. During rehearsals, the actress cast as Willy Loman's adulterous lover, frustrated over the demands of playing a floozie, snaps, "I'm already being so slutty. What does he want? Could I be... a bad woman?" (Oh, for an intimacy director!) When Morath, trying to assuage a miffed company member, brandishes a box of sweets as a peace offering, the offended party pronounces them "the candy-covered bullets of capitalism" before accepting them. Central to many of these exchanges is Shen Huihui, a young academic (and scholar of Arthur Miller) who is hired to serve as the rehearsal interpreter. Deeply unsure of herself and intimated by the presence of the playwright, she nevertheless nimbly cools many a potential controversy with her translation skills. Among other things, she smooths things over when Miller objects to the low light levels on stage (voltage in Beijing is at a premium, with factories taking priority) and declines to translate when Miller explains that Willy's mistress probably has one or two additional men paying court. Even Shen is prone to verbal mishaps, however: Displaying a bit of football protective gear for Biff to wear in the play, Miller says, "I used to be a bit of a terror on the playing field." "Mr. Miller says he was a disaster on the football field," Shen reports. Indeed, Shen is the play's central character, rising to the challenge placed before her and, transformed by the experience, learning to embrace the wider world. As played by Jo Mei, she becomes the production's master diplomat, gaining assurance and maturity from scene to scene. Under Michael Leibenluft's fluid direction, an all-female ensemble, most of them double-cast, cycles through a variety of roles: Sandia Ang as Linda Loman's portrayer, her syrupy line readings giving way to a genuinely powerful performance; Sonnie Brown as Miller, confounded by the Chinese way of doing everything; Julia Gu as the theatre's in-house designer, grumbling that Madame Mao wasn't as difficult as this crazy American playwright; Claire Hsu, expertly shuttling between the roles of Happy (Willy's son) and Willy's mistress; and Lydia Jialu Li as Inge Morath and the actor who plays Willy. Chika Shimizu's set design, which places the audience on three sides of the action, has a muted color palette that evokes Communist China of the period; it also expands for in-performance scenes from Death of a Salesman and the Chinese play Thunderstorm. Cinthia Chen's projections include scene-setting images and the all-important surtitles for a play performed half in Chinese and half in English. (I wish the titles were more felicitously placed, but this may partly be a function of the ground plan.) Kai-Luen Liang and Da Xu provide sound effects that include applause, thunder, and, amusingly, a Chinese version of the Bobby Hebb pop hit "Sunny." Daisy Long's lighting and Karen Boyer's costumes are both solid achievements. Scenery, lighting, and video come together effectively in the final scenes, which layers an archival video of the Beijing Salesman production on top of the live actors -- it's a real goosebump moment -- followed by a moving coda that includes testimony by Shen's real-life counterpart, looking back at her life in the West and (sometimes) China. By then, we are in thrall to the story of an act of cultural diplomacy that had the power to change lives. In Salesman, Tiang makes a hard-to-dismiss case that art may be the most efficacious instrument of empathy. It's a message that, more than ever, we need to hear. --David Barbour 
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