When we were a little boy, back in 1905 or thereabouts, there were still a few ancient people around who dated themselves unhesitatingly by claiming to have been born "Before the stars fell."
As we grew older and became better able to grasp The significance of such things, we learned that there had indeed been a shower of meteors across the Southern States back in the 1830s, with Alabama in the center of same and, twenty or more years after this awakening of ours, there was a book published and a song plugged "Stars Fell on Alabama."
What we are getting at, at this late date, is that not all the stars fell on Alabama that time in 1835. Because in the wake of an interval of 129 years, there came another meteoric shower, this time in the immediate vicinity of Twin City’s Wynn Richards Taylor's Playhouse, on Thursday and Friday evenings of last week. The occasion was the presentation of Arthur Miller's of a Salesman" with Don Lisle directing, in a brand-new phase of Theatricals for a Greenville audience, known as "In the Round." Presumably, the setup is so-called because the spectators sit all around the stage, i.e., on all four sides of same, with the stage itself being square or oblong as in conventional theatre. And the entire production was open-air.
As we said in the preamble there were stars all over the place, so many that the trailer built and loaned by the Dunaway family for a dressing-room couldn't begin to contain the cast in its entirety. It's a great play, this "Death of a Salesman", with a lesson to be learned in nearly every line.
It's depressing, in that it's the sort of tragedy that is taking place everywhere and every day in this land that we used to think was a happy land. You see the seamy side of selling, the hopelessness that is the lot of the aging salesman who has lost his grip, even as he hopes lightning may strike to restore the old pep and zip and unloosen that pot of gold from the rainbow.
Perhaps the scene that reached its deepest down was where the other woman was getting the caresses and the brand-new silk stockings from Salesman Willie up Boston-way, (this was way back in '28 when Al Smith was running for President and nylons were as yet unspun), while Willie's trusting and longsuffering wife Linda was darning her own wornout hosiery back home in Brooklyn.
Willie is all mixed up, and the flash-backs all but place you inside his poor addled brain. And what a feast for the cynics, would have us believe that a man is here today and gone tomorrow.
Look, they will say, at Willie's employer, kicking him out with neither compassion nor compunction and look at Willie's funeral, with less than a corporal's guard on hand to pay its respect to the memory of a salesman who had been a burner in his day. Look at Willie's issue, one son is labeled "a philandering bum" by his Mother, and the other son a sticky-fingered misfit, who lives nearly twenty years deep in a past that's tangible only so much as a touchdown run in high school competition.
Yes, it's a great play and a depressing one. We couldn't go to sleep until all hours last Friday night, because we couldn't get those Lomans out of our mind. Poor Willie, grasping straws, and poor Linda, in a ringside seat for his disintegration and death.
Well, if it was a strain on us, just think what a wrack it has been for Emory Rose, having to project himself into such a characterization, two nights in a row, not to mention the build-up across several weeks of rehearsals. And for Mayna Fish (God bless her) in that role of buffer between a frustrated father and his shiftless progeny, a beacon in a raging sea of incompatibility.
Yes, there were lessons in just about every line of "Death of a Salesman," lessons driven home, not just by the principals aforesaid, but the supporting cast as well. So, orchids also to Robert Altshuler as Hap Wayland, Clifton as Biff, Dave Dunaway as Uncle Ben, Bill Yarbrough as Charley, Van Evans as Bernard Ray Graves as Howard, Woodie Terlizzi as The Woman, Carol Lisle as Jenny, Lance Hanshaw as Stanley, Ann Caillouet as Miss Forsythe, and Sandra Lea Low as Leila.
It was high-grade entertainment, all the way across the board, and thanks Carl Alder and Son, for the refreshments at half-time. And wasn't that Tommy Zumwalt, in fancy dress including a string-lie and make-up, whom we saw backstage (or side-stage or what have you) when the show was over? Was he standing in for someone? Maybe so, since we cannot find his name in the program.
Again orchids to all hands, and say, Emory, we hope Countess Aurelia Kalie won't have too much trouble with a second star in the family and that she can soon get her favorite salesman out of the « clouds and back in the groove with that Stoneville 2 B pedigreed cotton seed et cetera et cetera.
B.C.
P. S. Just think of a star like Emory Rose "getting himself borned" in a place like Dahomey up thar' In Bolivar County, Miss.
