Two women battle in Milwaukee Repertory Theater's 'Wife of a Salesman,' but are they fighting their real opponent?
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Attention must be paid.
So in "Wife of a Salesman," playwright Eleanor Burgess pays attention — to the wife, to the mistress, to the salesman's behavior and to the division of labor that marriage in American life assigns to women.
Milwaukee Repertory Theater co-commissioned Burgess' play with Writers Theatre of Glencoe, Illinois, where it was performed earlier this year. The Rep's production, directed by Marti Lyons, opened Friday evening at the Stiemke Studio.
As good American literature students know, Arthur Miller's tragedy "Death of a Salesman," which premiered in 1949, is considered one of the great 20th-century dramas. (A new production is in previews for its Oct. 9 opening on Broadway, with Wendell Pierce in the title role.)
But more than 70 years after the debut of "Salesman," a person can honestly say that women's roles in the Miller play were lightly sketched, and women's issues underexplored.
In Burgess' answer play, the wife (Heidi Armbruster) shows up at the Boston apartment of the mistress (Bryce Gangel) under a flimsy false pretense to confront her. They argue like rivals in an edgy sitcom, gaining and losing the upper hand, until a disclosure finds them talking woman to woman rather than as competitors.
However, a disruption breaks this connection, and suddenly we're in the world of the actors, Armbruster's Heather and Gangel's Violet. Surprise, surprise: These two smart and successful women cope with some of the same inequities as the wife and the mistress.
Jim (Bobak Cyrus Bakhtiari), their director, tries to get this dress rehearsal back on track when the women begin to delve into deeper issues. He's a practical guy, but also an utterly conventional voice.
This pattern of perform-disrupt-question happens again, right when the characters are connecting emotionally. When Heather raises a script question, Jim tells her that audiences don't want to see the wife and mistress bonding, they want them fighting.
I'm going to have to disagree with Jim here.
"Wife of a Salesman" is most incisive when the wife and mistress are questioning the salesman's behavior, and when the two performers scrutinize marriage itself. For a woman who proclaims herself a happily married mother, Heather is blunt about the domestic imbalance.
When the mistress points out all the labor the wife has performed without compensation, Armbruster delivers one of the play's punch lines: "He sold things, but he didn’t make them. I made things, but I never sold them. I just gave them away."
As that speech suggests, "Wife of a Salesman" is also a drama about the burdens of capitalism on American women. Burgess is not George Bernard Shaw — no long dialectics here. But Gangel's Violet is right when she dubs the set's enormous radio "the voice of capitalism," feeding the characters narratives that shape their lives.
And with capitalism in mind, bringing us back for one last kick at Miller's play, Burgess suggests that the salesman may have had a motive beyond horny loneliness when he took up with the mistress.
Contact Jim Higgins at jim.higgins@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jhiggy.
If you go
Milwaukee Repertory Theater performs "Wife of a Salesman" through Nov. 6 at the Stiemke Studio, 108 E. Wells St. Visit milwaukeerep.com or call (414) 224-9490.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee Rep's 'Wife of a Salesman' upends an American classic
