Excerpt from Kazan on Directing

EDITOR: The action of the play shifts between sometime in the late 1940s—shortly after the end of World War II—and fifteen years before. Often the two periods interweave, the past actions reflecting the movement of the protagonist's obsessions, memories, and fantasies.

Traveling salesman Willy Loman, in his early sixties, returns to his small Brooklyn home late at night after suffering terrifying losses of concentration while driving to Boston on a selling trip. He has only narrowly avoided fatal accidents, for some inner compulsion and vaguely formulated solution to the dilemma of his existence is moving him to suicide. Distracted, tormented, and agonizingly depressed, Willy is unable to control his thoughts, imagining himself in the past, often talking aloud to those who inhabit his memories.

He is now paid sales commission only, and the present owner of his firm, Howard, the son of the man who had hired Willy many years before, wants to be rid of him, refusing to give the exhausted Willy a job in the New York office.

His wife, Linda, fusses over him, trying to assure him that all will work out. Later she defends him against his son's contempt: “Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”

In a room above, their two sons, Biff and Hap, overhear their parents' conversations. Biff, now in his early thirties, has just returned from an itinerant, pointless existence out west, and Hap, who has an apartment nearby, has come home to spend “spend time with his older brother.

Willy is struggling to find the reason why, and the moment when, his life took a wrong turn, why everything he tried to accomplish failed, and why his elder son, his “golden boy,” who seemed destined for a triumphant life, has achieved nothing.

He reexamines the time of Biff's senior high school year. When Biff failed his math final and refused to go to summer school to retake the course, he threw away the chance of a college football scholarship. Since then Biff's life has been a miasma of lost ambition and unsure goals, lacking substantial identity. He has become a compulsive petty thief, as if thievery were a way of pacifying his panic, of grabbing what life has denied him.

Biff and Hap plot a senseless scheme to sell sports equipment with the backing of someone who had once employed Biff as a clerk—and from whom Biff had stolen some goods years before. Biff's rejection by his former employer, who barely remembers him, forces him to face the insubstantial and baseless goals of his life (dreams of building success on being “well liked,” of beating the competition, the corrupt ideals of his father) and compels him to force his father to recognize that all the hopes Willy had for his son were insidious delusions.

The decisively destructive moment in the past was Biff's discovery of his father with a strange woman in a Boston hotel room. For Biff, this act represented the betrayal of his mother and caused the collapse of his hero worship of his father.

At the end of the play Willy's solution to the terror of his existence is to commit suicide, trusting that his life insurance money will fund his son's future. Hoping that his death will appear accidental, he crashes his car.

FROM THE NOTEBOOK

SEPTEMBER 1948

The play is about Willy Loman.

It is a tragedy, in a classic style, with the drive of an inner inevitability that springs from a single fatal flaw. Willy is a good man, he has worth, but he is a salesman with a salesman's philosophy. Therefore, he dooms himself.

This is a love story, the end of a tragic love story between Willy and Biff. He builds his life on his son, but he taught the son wrong. The result: The son crashes and he with him. Without Willy loving Biff and Biff loving Willy, there is no conflict. The whole play is about love, love and competition. The boy loves him. The only way Willy can give anything back is through $20,000 [the insurance money Biff will receive on Willy's death].

Directing: You = Willy = All people. These people are not aware. What the audience should feel at the end of the performance is: pity, compassion, and terror for Willy. Every dramatic value should serve this end. (Your feeling for your own father!) This Willy is a fine, tender, capable, potentially useful human. He's just socially mistaught.

It is essential to highly contrast the behavior and confidence of Willy and the Boys “before and after.” Cause and effect. Thus you can make very clear what happened. Why it is Social versus Nature: i.e., it is happening all over!

It is essential to transfer your emotional feeling through the play to Willy. Find Willy in you. It is the portrait of the fall of a man, at the crash-end of a tragic love affair with his son Biff and what leads up to his suicide (in terms of inner emotional events).

It is essential to find Willy in you. You'll never do this play by mechanical direction, or by “forcing the energy,” or pounding as you have been doing lately (Sundown Beach and home life)—where a scene hasn't seemed “effective” you have “pushed.”

Now in this play all movement must come from character impulses. No crosses, etc. Martin Ritt in Set My People Free gave a horrible example of Kazan direction at its emptiest: clean crosses and pound pound pound. WITH ENERGY SUBSTITUTED FOR EMOTION. General energy instead of particular emotion.

This play has a line that is all down the inside of Willy's spine. This man goes crazy right before your eyes and commits suicide, and Miller shows you the logic behind the “insane” act. You have to find this line in you.

For instance, when Art [Arthur Miller] said, if this man is doing one thing and the person across from him is doing the opposite (ex., Willy is talking, the other person maintaining a silence), Willy will suddenly change his behavior and do what the other person is doing (“the trouble with me is I talk too much!”). That is how insecure he is. He is swimming in guilt like you, completely uncertain like you; like you, he is completely uncertain; like you, with no real anchor, needing constant love as reassurance therefore unreliable because he will finally accept it from any quarter.

You can have simultaneous action quite often. Overlap all scenes. Stay “ahead” of the audience.

Follow Willy's internal line. A man finally gains his objective through killing himself. Subjective is the word. He has to be directed from the point of view of what happens in Willy's head.

The inner impulse and the emotions that lead to those impulses. The things he suspects, imagines, makes up, his defenses.

This play takes place as an arena of people watching the events, sometimes internal and invisible, other times external and visible, and sometimes both. The world is the world of Willy and the way he sees it. In the end, it is completely in his world. His eyes glaze over as he seems to be talking to them, but he is really talking within his own mind. The people watching have an emotional relation to Willy, trying to reach out to him. But by the end of the play, there is no one there for him to reach out to. He is living entirely within himself; the people watching this spectacle are horrified. The man simply isn't with them anymore.

The You in Willy, the guilt, the uncertainty, the constant need of an atmosphere of approval and love at all costs. The turning on people violently and then crawling to regain their love. The need for success, that approval too.

The opposition in the two opposing emotions.

The need to be preeminent versus the need to be loved and together.

Stylize the action of the flashbacks. Sudden vivid moments caught at peaks of high intensity, the way people are caught in a dream.

Make a ballet of it. Theatricalize it! Don't, for chrissake, be afraid. Make a piece of theatre out of it! It must have the vividness of an OPPRESSIVE NIGHTMARE!

In such a nightmare or even an ordinary dream there is an insistent or repetitive quality to certain of the details—which are the significant details—the whole scene of each of these flashbacks can be built around the insistent repetitions of a detail; for example, Linda with the wash basket and the stocking trailing out of one pocket.

This play has to be directed with COMPASSION, which simply means with a quick and intense realization of the PAIN of each of the characters and the true import of the SPINE, its living or emotional consequence.

But the director, as he directs from day to day, as he lives and grows with the actors on stage from day to day, must have his heart filled with COMPASSION, a fellow feeling, an empathy, a projection for and into the PAIN of each character.

Willy: guilt and shame, defeat, abandonment and humiliation. HE HAS FAILED. George Kazan Sr. Spine: He must win out finally, because he is too proud to admit his defeat.

Biff too—his pain, bewilderment and disgust with himself. This poor bastard hates himself, would destroy himself. Through this very hating of himself, because of it, the pain of it, he is ready to face who he is, find out who he is! This is the first step toward truth and help.

Hap: pain: the excluded. The stepson, the greatest danger with this character is to direct him externally and get a “characterization” effect. But the job is to feel out how the things he does, false and outlandish, come from his pain, from his life-long rejection. This poor miserable bastard is compelled to be something he won't like when he achieves it. IF! But he is consumed with the desire to make the grade, which is, translated, match someone else's standard.

Linda wants the nice normal things and in a sense has them! She has a husband she loves desperately. She has two fine sons. But there is something, something, she really doesn't understand that is killing her husband before her very eyes. Since it is within him, she can't fix it, discover it, ever realize quite what it is. Her mortal enemy is living within Willy. It is one half Willy's philosophy. So she is fighting an invisible, intangible, increasingly powerful enemy within her husband, and this enemy is killing him. Her life is to protect Willy.

Willy.

His fatal error (this is an “inevitable tragedy,” our Greek tragedy) is that he built his life and his sense of self-worth on something completely false: the Opinion of Others. This is the error of our whole capitalist system—we build our sense of worth not within but in our besting others and at the same time having their constant approval. A boy, Biff, must be both preeminent and still adored, conquering all and still loved by all. What an impossibility!

Consequently, he both hates and loves the same people and can neither really love or really hate anyone. If they perfectly approve of him, they are great. If, on some issue, they don't, they are his enemies. But completely, like Bob Lewis [director and teacher]. They are sudden complete shits. Suddenly he'll fall in love with someone, but this is meaningless, since it is nothing more than the expression of his need for their love. Or he'll suddenly hate. This too is meaningless!

A personality, for Willy, is that magical thing which some people are born with, and which makes them both pre-eminent, besting all others, and still liked.

Even his relationship to his children was based on their perfect, unquestioning approval of him. On this basis, he loved them. When they stopped adoring him, he hated them. In the early scenes Biff and Hap worship the old man. They are merely extensions, tools for self-worship, of his ego, When they grew up, they found they have been raised with only one point, to win their father's praise. When this didn't work, they hated their father, and he them.

A person “talks to himself;” in this case, has imaginary conversations with other people because of some compulsive reason. Usually, to defend himself, reenact some scene to prove himself, to attack someone that he failed to defend himself against properly in the real world. The action behind each of these imaginary conversations should be found.

Compare George Kazan [Kazan's father]; human potential for love and friendship (remember the warm old days at Atesh farms, consider how he does the shish kabob) and the business side of him. How much less of a man that makes him. Walter Fried [producer] ditto, vainly trying to be something he's not and how this eviscerates and disfigures him. Still, he has real talent for human love, and this charming side of him is aborted and crushed by his own efforts to live by the competitive principle.

And the horrible things Willy Loman taught his children.

The philosophy of Aggression, Competition, and Pre-eminence. “You are loved only if you are successful,” which kills, and this is the central philosophy of our Civilization.

Another similarity to you: He finds “criticism” where none is intended. He sees imputation of guilt where none is intended. So he is constantly defending himself where there is no attack. He is drowning in guilt, and at the same time he attacks Linda. He wants her absolute and uncritical love: “You do love me completely and still uncritically, don't you, even though I have just been slamming hell out of you?”

Biff and Willy.

Bound in love. They are each other's shame. (They are the worst of themselves by what terrible things they see much more clearly in each other.) Biff especially is embarrassed constantly by what terrible things he learns about himself by looking at his father. It's terrifying. That's what Biff means when he says he can't look him in the face.

None of the dream figures are in the past. They are as much in the present. They are as Willy needs to think of them for reasons of personal dignity, self-esteem, etc.

Linda in the past is a figure fashioned out of Willy's guilt. Hardworking, sweet, always true, admiring. “I shouldn't cheat on a woman like that. Dumb, Slaving, Loyal. Tender, Innocent.” In reality, she is much much tougher. She has consciously made her peace with her fate. She has chosen Willy! Fuck everyone else. She is terrifyingly tough. Why? She senses Willy is in danger. And she just can't have him hurt.”

FROM SCRIPT NOTES

In the first scene, Willy tells Linda in thorough detail exactly what happens in a car—or later with Howard. He gets so compelled, passionate, and involved that he loses himself and gets terribly frightened that he has lost the source of love he so badly needs and so he crawls back and begs for it!

Linda has unconsciously been expecting a suicide—in a rush to make sure nothing is wrong. Last time it was an Accident.

Boys' scene:

Premise: They are together. Love each other. They are not aware that each has changed. That things are completely different. That is the dramatic discovery of the scene.

Biff is fighting out loud the same old battle that he's been shadow-boxing for months, years. He is stuck in a rut of bewilderment. And he can't get rid of it because he doesn't know who he is, where he is, what he wants. His father has really fucked him up. He can't accept who he is because it conflicts with his father's idea of Pre-eminence.

Hap has a simple aim: to get Biff to stay home. The truth is he approaches it with the techniques of a Salesman—since he is one—by winning the confidence of the Customer. Selling his personality, getting on the same side, and then giving him the old harpoon fast.

Resolution: So it takes Biff time to discover that Hap is “taking” him, that Hap is different, that he no longer feels close to Hap and that it's over between them.

Willy at the refrigerator: In the first fantasy sequence the PLOT DEVELOPMENT is that Willy faces the question: Was it my fault? Did I louse up my son? That is why he brings Ben back. For the first time he faces the question or the challenge: “It was your fault Willy!” “You ruined Biff.” The scene should have a Stylized Unity, which is based on Insistent Detail.

The Woman: The women he had met on the road he remembers in the way most flattering to him: Crazy about him! Cute, pretty, so proper! Whoever would have thought she was laying him? But boy was she sexy, and she couldn't wait to have him again!! And yet the joke, the wonderful joke, she looked so well mannered, neat, clean.

EDITOR: Some months after the opening Kazan was displeased with the performances. He sent a letter specifying his complaints to the four leading members of the cast: Lee J. Cobb, Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Kennedy, and Cameron Mitchell.

People ask me how a performance can be kept up. It can only be kept up in one way: by being made better. There is still plenty to do on this show and on your performances. You are an exceptionally fine company, sincere and well-meaning. I can see that you have all been thinking about your parts. And there have been changes made. But the changes are not for the good. And I have to say something about each one of you, and then next week I will have some rehearsals to see if we can really get the show firmly on the right track.

You gather I was disappointed in what I saw last night.

But first I want to say something about the show as a whole. There is a quality gone out of the show, and that is a central one, an intangible one, and one that is hard to keep up, and one that cannot be faked. The play is about a family. A family, at its most simple, is a group of people bound together not only in a tie of blood. That is not the important thing. The important thing is the tie of LOVE. That is what makes it a family. And when a family is torn apart by dissension and conflict, what is being lost is the most precious thing, the love of these people for each other. That is what is in jeopardy, nothing else. A bitter argument on a street between two men is an object of only passing concern. But if you know about these people, know they are bound together in a bond of love, and above all if you feel, even while they're quarreling, that they really and deeply love each other; well, then something is at stake there that concerns and interests every single human.

This is what I felt absent last night on the stage. The play, to begin with, got off to a most unfortunate start. You will forgive me if I'm blunt. Something has died that existed between Lee [Lee J. Cobb, as Willy] and Milly [Mildred Dunnock, as Linda], and something central has gone out of that relationship. It is absurd of a director to say that he doesn't care what your relationship is off the stage. I do care. It shows on stage. What there is now are two very accomplished actors. We do not see a man and wife.

The impression I had was that the main feeling Lee had was one of annoyance with Milly, and that the main feeling Milly had was a stalwart kind of being on guard: the result for her being a clear, crisp, bright, and thoroughly professional exterior, like a good simonizing job, not a scratch on it.

I have no intention of going way back to fundamentals. You are as intelligent a group of actors as a director could be thankful for. And you can remember what I stressed originally, and you can work together to get it back. You have an obligation to each other—you can only be good together, remember that—and of course, you have an obligation to the play and to me which I don't need to stress.

But let me say one fundamental thing. The main thing you have to create, each of you, in that first scene is something that you have to create not on stage but off stage, before you come on. Milly, for instance, is a woman who has alone carried the pain and the weariness and the discouragement of a lifetime with Willy: She is worn to the hub [nub?]. Physically exhausted and carrying on on nerve alone. She wouldn't ever show this to Willy, and this makes her more and more tired. Above all, she is frightened to death. The central fact is that she loves him and that from day to day she expects his suicide, news of his death. She would never show this to him, or show pity to him, and this makes her tired, too. She is holding on, waiting for a disaster that is sure to come. What happens now is that we have a charming, successful, and thoroughly professional performance, one that she knows is good. Much of the play is being played as if you know it's good. It's not nearly as naked and disarmed as it was.

And Willy, too, when he comes in, should enter as if from a nightmare. He is not just annoyed at Milly for asking questions he considers silly. That is a color, a secondary color. He too has frightened himself to death, as he realizes that he's unconsciously trying to kill himself. He's shaken. He is old. He is thoroughly and completely depleted. Lee Cobb is a man in excellent health, at the top of his career and his personal powers. You simply have to do a tremendous job—more, much more than you can possibly realize before you can show yourself on stage and dare to pretend that you are Willy Loman. And when you're there in the room with your wife, you do not, I mean you should not, talk to her. There should be very little awareness of her as someone who loves you utterly and without qualification and who spells home to you. And when you growl at her a bit and contradict her a bit, that is home too, for a wife means among other things someone to grouse at freely.

Now I have taken the liberty of using Milly and Lee as examples to expand upon, but I don't feel Howard loves Willy as much as he did, and I don't feel Johnny Kennedy [Arthur Kennedy, as Biff] adores him the way he used to, and I don't feel that Tom Pedi [as Stanley] hero-worships Cameron Mitchell [as Happy], and all in all you seemed last night like a company of Equity actors, and goddamn it, the soul has gone out of this show.

I tried during rehearsals to give each one of you a single hook to kind of hang on to. For instance, with Milly I said it was to protect Willy. That's all she's doing. It's as if her husband was dying of cancer and goddamn it, she was going to protect him from any least possible injury and insult. She was going to protect him. That's a different thing from protecting herself, or putting her sons in their place. For instance, the point of the brightness at the beginning of Act Two is to send Willy off full of confidence so that he can knock Howard for a loop. She is not bright, doesn't feel right. It is all for Willy's sake. And withal, this woman who is protecting Willy, with her life and what is left of her body, is worn out; she is a little mouse of a woman. She is not capable of big scenes. Until the last couple of years she never raised her voice in the house. The interesting part of it is that Milly is better than she was in the young parts because those qualities she has gained from the deserved acclaim her performance has received, her confidence in herself, her very right pleasure with herself, and her general rested state all contribute to a new excellence in the younger scenes but have a bad effect in the main ones.

And speaking again of the little handles I tried to give each of you, mottos as it were that you can hang on to (spines we used to call them), I told Lee that he was trying to win out. That he was a proud person and that he was finally successful: He won out. The man is not aware of his own pain, and above all he is not aware of his own significance or of the significance of his pain. Now there is a subtly intruded but finally a vast difference in his performance. This man last night suffered and was aware of it. He took time for it. Willy is much more naïve, and he always fights back. Willy never feels sorry for himself. He always fights back, if it's only by blaming someone else. The character is always more naïve. He is in fact childish. We watch him with wonder because, despite every reasonable conclusion he might draw from events, he goes on behaving the same way. The best example is: “That boy is going to be magnificent.” Nothing has penetrated. Nothing ever penetrates. He is bound to win out, and he does. He never thinks of himself as wrong. He is not as smart as Lee, nor as subtle, nor as aware, nor as understanding. He is dumb, almost blind. He is an energy, a force. He is unbalanced. He is crazy, to put it on one final, all-inclusive word. When he tries to convince Biff in the restaurant scene that Oliver greeted him warmly and so forth, he is not being tricky, the poor son of a bitch believes it, and he does it with full-hearted giving of himself. He forces Biff to quaver and waver and finally begins to say things that didn't happen. Biff, a young strong man, is thrown off the line of the truth that he is desperately clinging to by Willy's force. There is nothing subtle about this force. It brooks no denial. A man has to bow to it. It is insane.