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The Hey, did you know this really interesting thing once happened in history?
play can be delicate to pull off.
The appeal is obvious (wow, thatisinteresting!
), while the pitfalls can sometimes be buried under a proliferation of cool facts.
Neither is intensely dramatic, but both are theatrical.
Salesmanbegan with its director, Michael Leibenluft, who discovered Arthur Millers memoirSalesman in Beijingwhile in college.
(The Mandarin characters in thisSalesmans title, pronounced zhisi, mean death of.)
Tiang signed on to write the script in 2017.
Gu is also delightful as Designer Huang, Renyis master of mise-en-scene.
Okay, Ill accept them.
Shens interpretation of his distress: Congratulations, everyone, you achieved a performance time of four hours!
Zhu Lin (Sandia Ang), the actress playing Linda Loman, is impressed rather than horrified.
No wonder hes an American master.
Shens explanation: In America, they have this thing called insurance.
People get money for dying.
Ohhhh, respond Li and Mi, like revolutionary martyrs.
Ultimately,Salesmanbreaks open into a kind of multilayered memoir-meets-documentary.
The old footage feels semi-miraculous, as does Chika Shimizus superb scenic design.
Shimizus set both acknowledges and expands upon this raw material; it playswiththe architecture rather than simplyinit.
Heres the gist: On October 10, 1776, a 24-year-old Quaker woman named Jemima Wilkinson died.
Or at least, thats how the prophet that the Quaker-formerly-known-as-Jemima became would later explain it.
In death, Jemima received a vision, and then a new person was born.
For the next 43 years, until their (second?)
The shows creative trio might be thinking about SOPHIE and 100 Gecs; I kept thinking of Sufjan Stevens.
