Salesman之死 and Room, Room, Room …

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, that is interesting!), while the pitfalls can sometimes be buried under a proliferation of cool facts. Chiefly, these plays run the risk of being all events and no Event — living Wikipedia pages without a motivating, animating struggle.

Right now, in the East Village and in Williamsburg, two new Interesting Excerpt From History plays are taking a different approach to this tricky terrain. Rather than leaping across the plot-versus-drama trap, Jeremy Tiang’s Salesman之死 (at the Connelly Theater) and the collaboratively authored, effusively titled Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone (at the Brick) have chosen to navigate around it. Neither is intensely dramatic, but both are theatrical. They make the most of their spaces, their ensembles, the exposed tools of their stagecraft, and their connection with the audience to build productions that feel edifying, and more importantly, meaningfully communal.

Salesman之死 began with its director, Michael Leibenluft, who discovered Arthur Miller’s memoir Salesman in Beijing while in college. The book is the playwright’s story of his 1983 trip to China, where he was invited during the post-Mao cultural thaw to direct an all-Chinese cast in a production of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theater. (The Mandarin characters in this Salesman’s title, pronounced “zhisi,” mean “death of.”) Years later, after spending time directing in Shanghai, Leibenluft began looking for collaborators to help turn Miller’s memoir into a play. Tiang signed on to write the script in 2017.

The resulting production is layered and engaging — it’s a memory play, a play about making a play, a true story, and a story of cultural contrast, confusion, and collaboration. It’s also fully bilingual — English and Mandarin surtitles are nimbly deployed throughout by a droll onstage operator, Xingying Peng, who also provides neat, simple transition-marking percussion — and it’s cast with six women, five who are immigrants from Taiwan and China and one who is Korean American. Leibenluft describes the show’s casting as a way to “[highlight] the women who are part of this history and who are often overlooked,” which is nice, if a little pat. However, there’s another, more theatrically compelling way to think about the ensemble, and that’s through the lens of the play’s shifted center — not Arthur Miller but the real-life interpreter who was hired to work with him, then a young professor of American literature at Peking University, Shen Huihui (played by Jo Mei).

Shen is our narrator, and like Tom Wingfield before her, she teaches us the rules: “Do note that tonight’s performance contains multiculturalism, meta-theatrical elements, and Communist ideas,” she informs us at the top of the show. The real Shen Huihui is credited as “Story Consultant” on the production, and it’s her perspective (or that of her onstage avatar) that shapes the play. These are her memories, and the women embodying them in part read as versions of her — a theater company of Shens, playing out this transformative chapter of her life.

That company is a fun one, especially when taking on the characters who populate the People’s Art Theater (or “Renyi” — “’Ren’ is people, ’yi’ is art,” Shen explains to Arthur). As Li Shilong and Mi Tiezeng, the two young men playing Biff and Happy in Renyi’s production, Julia Gu and Claire Hsu exude a wonderful combination of masculine seriousness about their craft, alternating confidence and confusion over American culture, and man-boy-ish mischief. (When they think no one is looking, Li tries to sell Mi one of the “interesting magazines” he found while on tour in Hong Kong: “the sort you can’t get in China.”) Gu is also delightful as Designer Huang, Renyi’s master of mise-en-scène. Stooped and shuffling, but sharp as upholstery tacks and apparently immortal, Huang takes glorious umbrage at any questioning of his craft — but he’s also ready to be appropriately appeased. When Arthur Miller’s wife, the Austrian photographer Inge Morath (Lydia Jialu Li, who also gives a lucid, dignified performance as Ying Ruocheng, the Renyi actor playing Willy Loman), brings him some sweets as an apology for a tiff with her husband, Huang purses his lips and considers shrewdly: “The candy-covered bullets of capitalism. Okay, I’ll accept them.”

While some of Salesman’s scenes can feel a little rote — crafted more around a historical nugget than an urgent investigation of theme or character — the show wisely moves along quickly to the play-within-the-play’s rehearsals. There, Sonnie Brown’s dry, furrow-browed Arthur Miller can take the stage (Brown’s flat American accent is just brusque and loud enough without becoming caricature), and plot can take a backseat to the production’s real interest: the often comic collision of cultures and the complexity of interpretation.

After the company’s first read-through, Miller — as all the Renyi actors refer to him, with something between respect and wary curiosity — is aghast at the play’s length. Shen’s 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. Even Renyi’s revered artistic director, the great playwright Cao Yu (also Ang, in a brief, entertaining cameo), “doesn’t write such long plays,” she marvels. “No wonder he’s an American master.” Much of the delight of Salesman之死 comes from its wryly observed moments of getting, if not lost, then at least turned about in translation. This kind of joke can feel a little easy, but Tiang, Leibenluft, and their ensemble avoid any sense of schtickiness through simplicity, sincerity, and focus. Everyone is here to do their job well — to listen, to learn, and to make something excellent — and if that requires a pause to figure out what exactly an insurance salesman is in the first place, so be it. Shen’s explanation: “In America, they have this thing called ‘insurance.’ People get money for dying.” “Ohhhh,” respond Li and Mi, “like revolutionary martyrs.”

Ultimately, Salesman之死 breaks open into a kind of multilayered memoir-meets-documentary. Cinthia Chen’s projection designs show us footage from Renyi’s actual 1983 production, flickering across the set as the actors perform along with it. The old footage feels semi-miraculous, as does Chika Shimizu’s superb scenic design. There’s a special thrill when a production manages to transfigure an old space like the Connelly, with its aura of gas lamps and ghost lights. Shimizu’s set both acknowledges and expands upon this raw material; it plays with the architecture rather than simply in it. By extending the stage into a thrust and, behind the proscenium arch, creating layer after overlapping layer in the playing space using curtains, scrims, and elegant, rotatable scenery, Shimizu renders the play’s palimpsest tangible. Every gesture is graceful, precise — an aesthetic demonstration of exactly what Salesman之死 aims to dramatize: the nuanced, elucidating, and transformative act of translation.

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Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone is part concert, part queer church service, part rave, and all big, tender, welcoming energy. The writer-performer-musicians Philip Santos Schaffer, syd island, and Andy Boyd — here collectively calling themselves Friend of Friend — are genuinely excited to bring you another historical fascination, this one known as the Publick Universal Friend. Here’s the gist: On October 10, 1776, a 24-year-old Quaker woman named Jemima Wilkinson died. Or at least, that’s 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. This was, in the show’s affectionate shorthand, PUF (like “puff,” no “the” necessary among friends). For the next 43 years, until their (second?) death in 1819, the Friend led a community of spiritual followers, preaching a radical variation on Quaker theology that stressed free will, God’s love, the abolition of slavery, and the possibility of utopian community and universal salvation. The Friend also, as Schaffer tells us early on in Room, Room, Room, “refused to use gendered pronouns or respond to angry demands that the Friend declare Friendself to be either a man or a woman, saying simply, ‘I am that I am.’”

Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone, at the Brick.
Photo: Acacia Handel

In a mostly empty space, accompanied by an array of quirky Gen-Z-meets-Powerpoint projections; accompanying themselves on ukulele, banjo, and accordion; and dressed in an exuberant variety of pink-and-teal thrift store chic, Boyd, island, and Schaffer take us on a 90-minute tour of the Friend’s life and work. Along the way, personal reflections on growing up — on gender, God, shame, joy, and the inherent transness of hyperpop — interweave with historical fact and original song (and, fair warning, a healthy helping of earnest audience participation).

Room, Room, Room often feels like a live performance of a folk-pop concept album, complete with dramatized liner notes — and its real achievement is that many of the songs do indeed slap. Days later, I’m still humming the title tune, wherein the Friend’s sermon recounting their great pre-resurrection vision is set to music. Boyd, island, and Schaffer often draw their lyrics from the Friend’s deep catalog of spiritual writings, and there’s something wistful and raw about hearing such solemn, ecstatic texts as delicate indie tunes. The show’s creative trio might be thinking about SOPHIE and 100 Gecs; I kept thinking of Sufjan Stevens.

As singer-songwriters and as musicians, Friend of Friend shares a level of craft, sincerity, and whimsy that keeps the vessel they’ve built buoyant, despite its intermittent tendency to steer towards well-meaning sanctimony. It’s a popular destination these days, and it can be difficult to figure out whether heading there is an honest, needful act of reparation, or a kind of impulsive, self-conscious flag-planting — a shorthand for a set of values that could more effectively be shown rather than told.

Room, Room, Room shines brightest when it returns to such generous showing — when island asks us, if we’re okay with it, to “join hands, and join in with our voices in the refrain the angels spoke to PUF.” Or when Schaffer plays “Subway Song,” a lyrical gift to that stranger on the train who sees them, is seen by them, and for a moment helps to create a shared space of solidarity and safety. Or, especially, when Boyd sings gently of the certain apocalypse, then encourages us, in the face of it, to love each other harder.

Salesman之死 is at the Connelly Theater through October 28.
Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone is at the Brick through October 28.