A Yiddish-language version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (Toyt Fun a Seylsman) is being staged in Toronto as part of this summer’s Ashkenaz Festival.
Avi Hoffman, who earned a Best Actor Drama Desk nomination for his acclaimed portrayal of Willy Loman in the 2015 New York production, reprises his role of Willy, and the show features members of the original New York cast as well as several Canadian actors.
Miller’s sister, Joan Copeland, who saw the play in New York, said the character of Willy is based on their Uncle Manny and that Miller had “always imagined the play done in this way – a story of a Jewish immigrant struggling to achieve the American dream,” Hoffman said on the telephone from his home in Coral Springs, Fla.
Miller grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., and was surrounded by Yiddish-speaking immigrants who came to the United States from 1880 to 1920. “It is absolutely conceivable that Miller intended [the play] to be presented in this way, but in 1949 being Jewish was not exactly popular,” Hoffman said, adding that famous actors were changing their names because “they had to be American.”
Hoffman said doing the play in Yiddish, a language of great emotional depth, “brings a 5,000-year history of persecution and suffering that you can’t get from any other language” and adds an extraordinary element to the play.
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Hoffman views the story as an American tragedy about an immigrant whose struggles to support his family destroy him. At one point Willy lies to his wife, Linda, about how much commission he’s earned and Willy admits he doesn’t have enough money to cover their expenses.
Immigrant Jews in the United States (and Canada) organized labour unions and perceived the “lack of justice in the American system and the disparity between the rich and the poor. I think Arthur Miller was commenting on these things,” Hoffman said, adding that the same inequality still exists today.
“Miller was trying to talk about the struggle by a poor immigrant Jew to succeed in America, just to make ends meet – not to become rich – and [Willy] was] unsuccessful.”
In the play, it’s not clear why Willy has problems with his memory and is having visions. He sometimes slips back and forth between the present and past, and when he’s reliving memories, others notice that he’s talking to himself. Hoffman said he thinks Willy has early onset Alzheimer’s, a disease most people were unaware of in 1949 when Miller wrote the play.
“I see Willy as a very tortured soul who finds himself in an emotional and physical dilemma that he doesn’t comprehend. His brain is shooting off in places he can’t control. He can’t drive a car, he’s not sure what’s happening. He thinks maybe the coffee bothered him,” Hoffman said.
The cast is international – Suzanne Toren, Ben Rosenblatt and Adam Shapiro, who were part of the original New York production; Canadians Mikey Samra, Sam Stein, Deb Filler, Michael Gordin Shore, Hannah Galway and Hannah Gordon; American Spencer Chandler, and Daniel Kahn, who’s from Berlin.
“The characters they play all relate to the same Jewish experience that Willy Loman brings to the piece. I’m not suggesting for a moment that all the characters are refugees,” Hoffman said. “American Jews spoke Yiddish, they understood the Yiddish milieu, they understood the Yiddish context of refugees escaping persecution and coming to America to try to build a new life in the Golden Land. And that is the context within which our production lives. I think all these actors are uniquely qualified to bring that context to the piece.”
Death of a Salesman in Yiddish, with English surtitles, runs at the Toronto Centre for the Arts from Aug. 31 to Sept. 10. For tickets, visit www.ticketmaster.ca.