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T H E S A L E S M A N O N T H E S T A G E : A S T U D Y I N T HE S O C I A L I N F L U E N C E OF D R A M A CHRISTOPHER INNES York University B u sin ess is not only the business of America - as President Coolidge an nounced - but also of American drama. There are two major ways in which this economic focus has been reflected on the stage: an overwhelming number of instantly forgettable comedies written for entertainment, and a small but serious number of plays that analyze society in a spirit of protest or reform. If the popular Broadway fare of the twenties and thirties is any guide, the drama of social criticism had little direct effect on the public, who even in the Depression flocked to see their dreams come true in plays where the heroes gain heiresses or riches by guile or good fortune, and any attack on the business world was conservative, attempting to re-establish the "old-fashioned" values that everyone respects as long as they do not have to live by them.1 Using the mainstream of Broadway as a barometer to measure the attitudes of the public, the American myth of success can be shown to have prospered in spite of events, while even such critically acclaimed plays as Waiting for Lefty or The Adding Machine had little wide influence. The question as to whether drama can change society is an old one, and the traditional answer is no. Playwrights "but echo back the public voice"2like "lay preachers, peddling the ideas of their time in a popular form ."3 Yet, looking at the fate of the American dream and the protestant work ethic, it can be demonstrated that it is indeed possible for the stage to do more than passively mirror established social views. As a corollary, it can be suggested that Odets' or Elmer Rice's failure to alter public consciousness relates to their approach rather than the intrinsic nature of the stage. Waiting for Lefty dealt with a specific injustice and proposed a definite course of action while The Adding Machine presented economic exploitation as a universal existential condition. The metaphysical level of The Adding Machine in fact gives the impression of almost justifying the society Rice attacks; and it would be fair to say that the more general a play's social criticism is, the nearer it comes to being a protest against life itself with a Beckettian "Nothing to be done" as the only response. At the other extreme the specificity of Waiting for Lefty tied it to a particular circumstance, and-as the Becks have found out more recently with productions like Paradise Now, which was intended to end with a naked audience pouring out into the streets to start "the permanent revolution''4 - there will be no English Studies in Canada, iii, 3, Fall 1977 337 discernible effect unless the audience come to the theatre already prepared to act, in which case the play might be said to have reinforced their attitudes, but not changed them. However, in the decade after 1945 three now familiar plays approached "the business of America" from a new angle. Instead of the rhetoric of the thirties which attacked dishonest business practices or set profiteering bosses against exploited masses, the morality of business is exposed and a single figure, the salesman, is used to represent the economic system as a whole - following the claim of sales-manuals that we are all salesmen at bottom: "no matter what you do, whether you sell, buy, design, manufacture or manage, your success will depend on your ability to sell."5 O'Neill first drew the outlines of this symbolic salesman in The Iceman Cometh, written in 1940 though not produced until 1946. Miller explored the mental contours in Death of a Salesman three years later, and Gelber extended the image in 1957 with The Connection. In all three plays the salesman is the carrier of the American Dream, which is rooted in the origins of the country. The relationship...
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