Staging

• Miller’s Use of Expressionism: Stage Design

  Miller’s main reason for using Expressionist staging was to dramatise Willy’s psychological struggles.
• Representation

  • Miller originally intended to call his play, The Inside of His Head and the stage design creates a space in which Willy’s mental disintegration can be easily visualised and where characters move seamlessly between past and present, from the house to the forestage, depending on Willy’s psychological state at the time.
• An air of the dream

  • Miller’s opening stage direction demonstrates the challenge that he gave to his designer, Jo Mielziner: “An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality.”
• Mielziner

  • Mielziner had to create a space which would root the drama in reality but also allow for something stranger, and more original – a dreamlike space which would allow Miller to bring to life Willy’s troubled psyche for the audience.
• Blurring time

  • In creating such a ‘fluid’ space, Mielziner was able to help Miller show Willy’s psychological collapse ‘in real time’.
  • As characters could move between past & present easily, with no artificial ‘boundary’ between them, and therefore no need to end a scene and change the stage setting, Willy’s increasing blurring of past and present in Act 2 happens almost instantaneously, helping to capture the full horror of what is happening to him.
• The city

  • Mielziner’s transparent setting allows us to see the “towering, angular shapes” of the surrounding apartment blocks crowd ‘through’ the Lomans’ roof, capturing Willy’s sense of his neighbourhood (and his way of life) coming under attack.
• Miller’s use of Expressionism: Lighting

  As Willy’s mind wanders between past and present, the lighting changes.
• Lighting

  • As scenes from the past intrude into Willy’s present, the apartment blocks towering above “fade out” and lighting and projections are used to suggest a more pastoral scene: the Lomans’ “surroundings become covered with leaves”.
• Inner thoughts

  • Miller also uses lighting to help reveal Willy’s inner thoughts: his fantasies and fears.
  • One example is the “golden pool of light” which surrounds Biff in the kitchen at the end of Act One as Willy fantasises about Biff’s suture success: “he’ll be great yet”.
  • Here, the lighting helps to capture Willy’s idealised view of Biff.
• A "glow"

  • Immediately after this, lighting is used to create a “glow” from the gas heater behind which Willy has hidden rubber tubing to be used in a suicide attempt.
  • The effect is to undercut Willy’s false optimism of the future and, before the curtain falls at the end of the first act, remind the audience of the desperation felt by Willy.
• Miller’s Use of Expressionism: Costume & Props

  Costumes are very important in the staging of the play, as the same actors are used to represent the characters at different time periods.
• Importance of costumes

  • Willy’s family and neighbours appear in different dimensions of time - real time and remembered time.
  • But Miller uses the same actors to represent the different versions of themselves, with costume being used as the key visual sign to an audience of where we are in time.
• Examples

  • Biff’s “sweater” and Charley’s “knickers” are signifiers to the audience of how time is intruding into the present.