Willy Loman, played by Ding Zhicheng, and his two sons in Death of a Salesman, produced by the People's Art Theater. Photos Provided to China Daily

Salesmen knock on your doors, or worse, stop you wherever you are. However, owning property in Brooklyn is now the equivalent of a real-estate purchase along the Third Ring Road in Beijing in the 1990s, which means you end up in an envious position overall.

Even though the play is much closer to us today, China still has not reached what America was in the play.

China's middle class is relatively young and splurging on luxury merchandise.

The penny pinching practiced by Linda Loman is seen in China mainly among the urban poor or rural populations, which are still very large demographics.

Presenting an essentially middle-class quandary is like laughing in the face of all those who are fighting for a chance to squeeze into the middle class.

Had this been a Chinese play or film, it would sound like a bunch of spoiled brats whining about the travails of too many shopping trips to Dubai or Paris.

Director Li Liuyi does not help matters much by offering a mishmash of styles.

While the 1983 production attempted to recreate an American family circa 1949, the new production places the story in a world that can best be described as never here nor there.

All the allusions to Americana, including American football, are there, but the characters interact in an innately Chinese manner - not Chinese as you may encounter in real life, but Chinese as in bad soap operas.

The actors, while highly talented, do not even attempt to look or act their age.

Willy Loman is sporadically old, and Linda is at most 45 and glamorous enough to be someone's trophy wife.

The set is inconsistently abstract, with white balls of various sizes in the pit that stands for the garden. This goes with the cello solo, which seems to strip away the specifics of the time and the place, but the effect is destroyed with the onslaught of contemporary rock music and the blasting of Star-Spangled Banner at the climax of both acts.

The only good thing about this production by the People's Art Theater - arguably China's best playhouse of traditional drama and especially those of the Realism School - is the free flow of scenes of reality and fantasy.

But then, one can easily achieve this in a smaller venue with a minimal or no set.

A classic is for all times.

Even though its story does not sit well with Chinese society in terms of the developmental phase, Death of a Salesman is fundamentally about Willy Loman's psyche.

His illusion of making it big should resonate with us Chinese when we are bombarded by messages and recipes of turning our dreams into reality.

Had the Chinese production emphasized this crucial aspect of the play, those of us sitting in the theater may find a not-so-subtle parallel between Willy Loman's dilemma and the get-rich-quick mentality in our environment.

Source: China Daily

Editor: Liu Xiongfei