American Dreams

Willy Loman’s tale, The Death of a Salesman, demonstrates an unraveling of the American Dream as his faith and hard work fail to bring him the opulence and security that he desires and, in many ways, deserves.  Despite his superficial devotion to his family, his nuclear unit implodes on several occasions, first with his father abandoning him, then his brother, and finally with his two children leaving him babbling to himself in a restaurant bathroom.  Furthermore, after years and years of faithful sales for his company he is let go after asking for the non-traveling position that he was promised years earlier (or so he claims).  And as if to add insult to injury, despite imagining that after his death his sons would truly see how known he was when people from all over the country come to his funeral, the only people who come are his family, Charley and Bernard.

At Willy Loman’s gravesite his son, Biff, proclaims that he “had the wrong dreams” and makes the case that Willy’s faith in the American dream and his own excellence was his undoing.  It would appear that if Willy would have just tried to find satisfaction in the mundane, everyday he would have not have ended his own life.  At the final scene, his wife, Linda discusses how on the day of Willy’s funeral she had made the final payment on their mortgage, something that would have been marked a huge accomplishment for most people, seemed to have meant little to the main character.

Mirror Images

Anna Deavre's one man show, Fires in the Mirror, uses the rage created from racially motivated violence to articulate the similarities in the experiences of seemingly opposite factions.  One point in the performance which articulates the author's message quite clearly is the progression of two successive monologues, "Seven Verses" and "Isaac", which express the opinions of two individuals on opposite sides of the 1991 Crown Heights controversy: an African American man, Minister Conrad Mohammed, and a Jewish woman, Letty Cottin Porebin.

In the first scene Minister Conrad Mohammed, describes the evils of slavery as being the greatest crime in the history of humanity, explicitly mentioning that it was a larger injustice than the Holocaust.  In the following passage, Letty Cottin tells the tale of her Uncle, whom was force to participate in the gas chamber to escape the holocaust.  

What is interesting about the two successive scenes is that despite Conrad Mohammed’s conviction that his race has endured greater suffering and is thus god’s people, the suffering felt by each group seems similar.  In fact, much of the suffering that Conrad associates with slavery was present in the Holocaust as well (murder, rape, torture, ect.).  Specifically, loss of identity, which Conrad asserts was among the most significant legacies of slavery is clearly present in Letty’s anecdote as well as, Isaac was made to exterminate his people along side the Nazi’s.

The similarities in the two stories allow Deavre to conjure up the image of a mirror, in that although the two parties are on opposite side of the pane, the struggles that, which they have endured are very similar (as in the case of the 1991 Crown Heights incident, the Holocaust, and other racially motivated crimes).  Such imagery is amplified by Deavre's portrayal of both roles and helps suggest that we are all hurt by the fires of hate.

September 13, 2010

I have read my syllabus and accept the terms of the course.