by Mel Gussow
MG: In working on the musical, have you been able to clarify the play?
AM: It’s more clearly what I intended in the first place: a metaphor for the ingestion of God by man. Man ingests God and replaces him, taking over his function. He destroys God on stage, and one second later, he resurrects him in his memory. Adam is God on earth. He accepts his humanity rather than remaining a perpetual child of innocence. The form is right for this kind of myth. I’m writing in condensed verse instead of with a linear psychological build. One can present rather than represent. With the original we never arrived at a satisfactory production. Everything was done psychologically.
MG: Could you compare the play and the musical?
AM: I love the abruptness of the changes that take place. The play has been steered by thematic necessity. All the actors will be on stage watching the whole thing instead of vanishing into a realistic set. It’s a kind of joyful playfulness rather than any deadly realistic attitude. There was no stylistic unity in the original. Once we were off on the wrong foot it was impossible to get back on the right foot. This time we got started in the spirit of the play. Willy-nilly it came about, a sort of improvisation from day to day – on a very organized basis. The actors have enormous freedom. One doesn’t have an investment or the whole pressure of opening in New York hanging over one’s head. We will play Michigan and another college. It could take two years from one university to another.
MG: But don’t you want to prove something about the play’s failure on Broadway?
AM: I don’t have to prove it on Broadway. For years, I’ve said we’re making a big mistake by failing to attempt to organize audiences in the country. At the University of Michigan, there is a tremendous physical plant. Costs are minimal. What makes this really feasible is that the actors are young and willing to move around. I’ve had more genuine creative enjoyment doing this than I’ve had in many years. It’s enormously stimulating to work on a kind of ad hoc basis. Everybody’s pores are open. Theatrical illusions come from language and sound and use of bodies rather than the use of scenery. Everything on stage is conditional – open all the time. In the morning we throw these kids a whole new curve, and they leap to it. Twenty minutes, and it’s in!
MG: How does it feel to be writing lyrics?
AM : It’s my first time. I love to do it. I started out as a singer. I had my own radio programme in Brooklyn when I was fifteen. I sang pop songs, great songs of the ’30s. I was accompanied by a blind pianist. I think we had about eleven people listening. I never got paid. Once I listened to what I was singing and I got embarrassed. I realized there were some damn good singers walking around without work.
MG: You’re going to be the narrator of the musical?
AM: My doing it made it more of an event.
Miller and I spoke occasionally during the next decade. The Archbishop’s Ceiling, a play about art and politics, was scheduled to open in December 1976 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. In August, the playwright summarized the theme as ‘what the soul does under the impact of immense power, how it makes accommodations and how it transcends the power.’ The scene is a room in an unnamed Communist country, the residence of a former archbishop. There are five characters, one of them an American writer.
AM: The ceiling symbolizes what happens below.
MG: It sounds like an overtly political play.
AM: We aren’t always aware that we are making adjustments to social power. The play is political in that sense, but it’s not a tract. Some people thought The Crucible was a tract-like play against McCarthyism. That was not my intention. I don’t believe in analogies. But it’s not just a crazy situation in a faroff place. It could happen in a corporation boardroom – anywhere unbridled power is immense.
MG: Is there humour in the play?
AM: Well, I think so! But it’s a drama obviously. Certainly it’s not a comedy – except to God. It’s a big laugh – up there. Down here, it’s quite serious.
A View from the Bridge had been revived at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in 1981, in a production starring Tony Lo Bianco as Eddie Carbone, and it would move to Broadway in February 1983. In October 1982, Miller was at Long Wharf directing two of his one-acts, Elegy for a Lady and Some Kind of Love Story.
MG: What provoked you to direct your one-acts?
AM: I wrote Elegy a year ago. I finished Love Story a few months ago. Both share an attitude: they walk the jagged edge of unreality. In Elegy, a man is trying to discern his relationship to a woman he thinks is dying. She isn’t on stage. The other is a crime story of a private investigator who has a relationship with a woman who he is sure has the truth to a murder case. She is a bit mad. Both are departures for me. I despaired of explaining them to a director, so I’m directing. In February I’m directing Salesman at the Beijing Peoples Theatre. I’ll have a guy [Yin Ro Chang] absolutely fluent in English alongside me. I wondered about their ability to handle time shifts. They feel they could do it. It centres on the family, which is an obsession of the Chinese.
MG: Besides A View from the Bridge, is there any other play of yours you would like to see back on Broadway?
AM: I’d like to see all of them back. But Broadway is a less giving environment than it used to be. It’s a surreal Coney Island, a big calliope making a lot of noise. Broadway will come back. It always does.
17 February 1984
‘It was just an image I had of this feisty little guy who was taking on the whole world’
In 1984, Dustin Hoffman played Willy Loman in a revival of Death of a Salesman on Broadway, directed by Michael Rudman, and with John Malkovich and Stephen Lang playing Willy’s sons. I followed the show from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to New York and wrote a profile of Hoffman for the New York Times Magazine. Before flying to Chicago to see the play and talk to Hoffman, I had lunch with Miller in New York.
MG: I remember more than fifteen years ago talking to you about Dustin. You said he would be a very interesting Willy.
AM: Dustin has great internal life on stage, and he has a quality of sympathy. He can deal with more than one feeling at the same time. For my work, that’s very important. Lee Cobb at his best does what Dustin does at his best – with many fingers on the instrument. Dustin can play contradictions, and not just straight lines. He is what I call an integral actor. He really does have to know with his brain and his belly what the centre of a dramatic issue is. He can’t work from the perimeter. I find this exhilarating because he peels it off like an onion until he gets to the middle of the middle of the middle. That can drive somebody crazy who is not accustomed to such assiduousness. There’s no harder worker than that man. I’m now an old geezer. I have never seen anybody attack anything with such thorough, total dedication. I shouldn’t say ‘nobody’; there have been actors that do, actors that I’ve worked with, but he is among the most rigorous of such people.
MG: Who are the others?
AM: Lee Cobb was led to it by Kazan because he could also get a little lazy. He had a marvellous voice and looked great. He could always lean on his equipment to get him through narrow spaces. Dustin can’t.
The waitress comes over and he orders a turkey club sandwich, but asks her if they could eliminate one slice of bread. She hesitates and says, ‘I’ll tell them to.’‘Tell them to,’says Miller, ‘and that will be the greatest thing they can do all day.’
Dustin starts to turn on a motor that doesn’t stop, day or night. He doesn’t sleep much when he’s working, running around in his running shoes, keeping himself fit. It’s a real athletic contest. I find it terrific – that kind of dedication.
MG: What’s in him that allows him to play Willy?
AM: I think it’s his own psychological makeup. I’m only guessing: his relation to his own ego and his own father, which he talks about on the stage sometimes, as an illustration of what he’s up to. That helps, if you’ve got some image like that.
MG: Does he actually relate his father to Willy?
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nbsp; AM: To a degree, I think. There is also another element which is completely superficial. When I originally wrote the play, I conceived of Willy as a small man, with a large wife. For this production, I had to change one line back to the original. Willy at one point says, ‘People don’t seem to take to me. I’m not noticed.’ With Lee Cobb, I made it: ‘I’m fat. I’m foolish to look at. I didn’t tell you but last Christmas I was calling on F. H. Stewart’s and some salesman went by and said something about ‘walrus,’ and I cracked him.’ The original line, which is what Dustin is saying is, ‘I’m small,’ and instead of ‘walrus,’ it’s ‘shrimp.’
For the first production, we tried to find a small actor, but we ran out of them; they weren’t right for it, temperamentally. We considered some very good actors: Bud Bohnen [Roman Bohnen], who was with the Group Theatre and is long since dead now; and Ernest Truex.
MG: Why did you think of the character as small?
AM: I don’t know. It was just an image I had of this feisty little guy who was taking on the whole world. It was Kazan who finally came to me and said, ‘Well, I’ve got an actor who can do it, but he’s certainly not small.’ And it was Lee.
MG: In the years since, the role has generally been played by large men, like George C. Scott.
AM: It usually ends up with somebody who is like Lee. Thomas Mitchell was a big man. When I talked to Dustin, he had that kind of feisty quickness that I always associated with Willy. You see, Willy is changing direction, like a sailboat in the middle of a lake, with winds blowing in all directions, and I associated that with a small man rather than with a great big man who makes slower turns. Willy’s a sidestepper. He’s a little puncher. And that of course is what Dustin always appeared to be to me.
MG: In the light of previous productions, it sounds like a reinterpretation.
AM: Right. It is. He’s a cocky little guy sometimes, and overwhelmed by the size of the world.
MG: Does that change the play?
AM: Yes. I think it does, to a degree. Probably in one sense it has a different kind of tragic effect, if you want to call it that. He’s striving to climb to the top of the mountain, and the striving is perhaps clearer in this kind of production. He doesn’t have it natively given to him by life. He’s got to struggle for it. For example, his whole relationship to his sons – he says, ‘I thank almighty God, you’re both built like Adonises.’ That has a slightly different meaning when one son is John Malkovich, close to six feet, and the other one, Stephen Lang, is a real strong guy, a very powerful fellow. Suddenly something else comes off the stage.
MG: Whereas Cobb physically dominated his sons.
AM: It’s a slightly different weighting.
MG: Cobb was younger when he played it, but he always seemed to be a father, where Dustin has always been a son.
AM: Dustin has made such a vivid impact in what he has done that people associate him with those roles. I have no problem with it. I don’t think the audience does either. And it’s not just his makeup. He does behave like Willy. I don’t think for a moment about him being too young, which, of course, he isn’t. Or being a son and not a father. Willy is sixty-three. As you said, Dustin is seven or eight years older than Lee was. Lee had natural advantages in that direction. Lee was born old. He was lugubrious, depressed. Dustin has always been chipper, full of energy. One of the surprises has been how little he needed to do to appear to be that old. He started off way older. I said, ‘Look, you’re being seventy-five.’
MG: When the idea was first presented to you, you didn’t greet it with surprise.
AM: No. I first met Dustin when Ulu Grosbard was doing that production of A View from the Bridge down in Sheridan Square [in 1965]. Dustin was the stage manager. Bob Duvall was playing Eddie. Dustin had not done any work that I had ever seen. It was Ulu who said, ‘There’s a guy here who should play Willy Loman.’ I looked around [at Duvall and Jon Voight, who was also in the cast] and I said, ‘I don’t see him. Where is he?’ He pointed at Dustin, and Dustin in those days looked like he had just barely gotten out of high school. Ulu saw something there. Of course he had known Dustin as an actor, which I had not. Maybe it’s some fix on the high intensity of that part. Personally I doubt that anybody over fifty could do it without some difficulty. You have to be a theatrically naive man, such as I was, to have thought you could do this unrelieved role, and find actors for it. You have to have young vigorous people to play it.
MG: Going back to A View from the Bridge, I would suppose that neither you nor Ulu would have thought of Dustin, then or today, for Eddie Carbone.
AM: No. And maybe there’s the ethnic thing too. But I’m sure he could play him.
MG: Willy has to prove himself again and again. That’s a strong line in Dustin’s work.
AM: Of course, Dustin is always doing that as an actor. He’s always taking on new challenges. And each of these challenges seems more improbable than the other. [Laugh.]
MG: What do you after you play Tootsie? You play Willy Loman?
AM: Right. When he told me two years ago he was going to play a woman, I really was floored. I had no notion what this was all about. But as soon as he showed me the photographs of tests that he was making, about makeup, hairdos – he was already investigating feminine types. It wasn’t simply, how do I look? He was being a specific type of woman, spiritually, psychologically. Then I thought, if he’s going to do that, I suppose it could work. He wasn’t doing it like Charley’s Aunt.
Inge [Morath, Miller’s wife, the photographer] has a photograph, which I think is prescient. She took it during the phonograph recording with Lee Cobb. Dustin, sitting next to Lee, was playing Bernard on the record. He was holding a tennis racket – and watching Cobb. I don’t what he was saying, but it was a typical Lee Cobb frown of a monumental disaster. It was obviously not while he was acting. He was just discussing something, and you can see Dustin watching him like a hawk. It’s such a telling moment. You can see him just watching him, saying, how is he doing this?
MG: When did this current production begin?
AM: It started about five years ago. We went on casting for months. Every once in a while Dustin would say, ‘Do you think I could really do it?’ The closer he got to the mountain, the more scared he became, as he should be. I never had very much doubt once he broached it seriously because his way of working is the way I like to try to write. It’s an integrated way of working. The consistency of the character, as between page six and page sixty, was deep in his mind: he draws it all in, rather than playing one moment after another.
MG: Did he have an image of the character before he began?
AM: He had a general image. I kept telling him, this is the hardest job you’ll ever try to do. In six months from now, you’re going to call me up and say, you know I think I’m getting to understand what I have to do. But he’s exhilarated. I give him notes at night, as the director does.
MG: What do you say in the notes?
AM: He’s too angry at one point, too caustic, or vice versa, he isn’t sharp enough with somebody. He’s moving into a scene in the past without having the blues. He’s miraculous. He’ll get up onstage the next day and you see a complete shift. Another actor will tell you, well, I’ll get it next week, by which time, you’ve forgotten what you said. He will attempt anything that is viscerally connected to the character, with the story, with the relationship.
MG: Has he ever done anything wildly wrong – and then it’s been thrown out?
AM: Not that it’s wrong, but a different way. It’s a purely interpretative thing. He might be moved to tears at one point – and he shouldn’t be weeping, he should be seeing something clearly. One of the hardest things to do is the yin and the yang at the same time. As Dustin puts it, when the dancer leaps in the air, the lower part of his body is trying to stay on the earth. That stretch is what you want. Try doing that. You’ve got to be a little lucky to do that. He’ll try it.
MG: Does that remind you of any other actor?
AM: The closest I’ve come to that kind of approach was not an actor, it was a director, and that was Kazan. Dustin is now just right. He has the maturity for Willy Loman. Thank God we didn’t try to do it too long ago. In my opinion, actors past a certain age – it differs with each actor – are going to get tired. This is running a 1500 metre race. This is not a hundred-yard dash. Act one is an hour and six or seven minutes. It’s a full-size evening. You’ve got to be in shape. He keeps himself in shape, as if he’s going into a boxing ring.
MG: When he went into the role he was already trying to dress and think like Willy.
AM: He bought himself a 1940s-type hat, trousers, trying to feel what it felt like to wear those kind of clothes. I guess he was working himself into how Willy stands and walks, and, of course, clothes can make a difference. He’s wearing double-breasted suits. As Dustin Hoffman, he certainly wouldn’t do that. And how shabby it should be, how ill-pressed or how pressed – he’s a meticulous worker, every detail is considered and made real. It reminds me of Olivier. When we were casting, Dustin read with everybody every day. He was there all day.
MG: Were the casting stories true, how he thought about the possibility of G. Gordon Liddy playing Willy’s brother Ben?
AM: Oh, yes. That’s how he cooked up Gordon Liddy. He wanted to see what somebody looked like who goes into the jungle. We normally would have cast the play in weeks. This one went on for months. He kept saying we’ve got to look at everybody. We had open calls [auditions open to everyone]. We have two women in the play who came in out of open calls, and one of them is extraordinary.
MG: What about Liddy?