As we prepare for the last two shows of this ten-week run, we wanted to post some additional responses. Here’s a letter from Michael Addison to director Aaron Davidman. In his long and impressive career, Michael has been chairman of the theatre department at U.C. San Diego and artistic director of the Berkeley/California Shakespeare Festival and has followed TJT since he brought our very first piece of work to La Jolla nearly thirty years ago!
I want to tell you how profoundly moved we were by the production.
The play, of course, but even more richly wrought than I had remembered, including the elements that evoke the structure of Greek tragedy, though cast in a modern frame. One can't call "Salesman" realism, in spite of its intense reality: the mythic struggle of the aging hero is central to an action that reverberates through family to the whole social entity.
Your work was definitive. Creation of yet another example of the work of one of America's few true ensemble theaters, orchestrating voices, gesture, movement, and all with spare but rich visual statement that revealed meaning. And the final choice of the ritual funeral, men wearing yamulkas as they poured the earth, was breathtaking: it stripped away the thin veneer of assimilation and revealed the heritage of yearning, effort, and pain that makes the play so truly universal, American, and – yes – Jewish.
Thanks, Aaron, to you and the cast for an evening rare and beautiful.
And here are excerpts from a review from the Berkeley Daily Planet
There’s been much talk of Traveling Jewish’s intention to make this a Jewish show with a Jewish Willy Loman. The notes in the program recall the Yiddish theater translation and production of 1951, with a review speaking of that show “bringing the play ‘home’ ... [catching] Miller [son of immigrant Jews], as it were, in the act of changing his name.”
True to their principle of being inspired by Jewish experience, Traveling Jewish has fashioned less a tragic look back at the Jewish diaspora in America than a true, multifaceted revelation of American experience through a Jewish perspective. “I still feel kind of temporary about myself,” says Willy.
Because this production’s accents, inflexions and mannerisms give this monumental play a different and fascinating texture, a new syncopation of street and domestic rhythms, it is a truly New York City Death of a Salesman—Manhattan-born Arthur Miller brought home…
The mood swings of Willy and his family are the pivot, in Aaron Davidman’s excellent directorial conception, for the true theatrics of the play, reflecting Miller’s innovations as a former radio playwright adapting the multiplex style of the medium to the live stage. Jim Cave’s spot-on timing with lights and sound design by Rex Camphuis (also production manager) and cellist Jessica Ivry’s original music help deliver the goods to this audience, which is on three sides of the action, up on stage left and right as well as in the orchestra section in front. Few productions ever get the humor, the lyricism (which Miller would hauntingly refer to), the synthesis of approaches that catches up the social, the psychological, the moral, the sheerly pathetic content up into a vortex that sways back and forth until, as Antonin Artaud said of Euripides’ tragedies, “the floodgates are open ... and we don’t know any more just where we are.”
