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much interested in is reality. This is something that can be
quite different. Realism can conceal reality, perhaps a little
easier than any other form, in fact. But what I am interested
in is the poetic, the confluence of various forces in a surprising
way; the reversals of man's plans for himself; the role of fate,
of myth, in his life; his beliefs in false things; his determination
to tell the truth until it hurts, but not afterwards, and so on.
In an early play like All My Sons it was realism as we know
realism; but I hope all my plays are realistic in the sense that
the view of life is on the whole a useful not a trivial one. The
form of Death of A Salesman was an attempt, as much as
anything else, to convey the bending of time. There are two or
three sorts of time in that play. One is social time; one is
psychic time, the way we remember things; and the third one
is the sense of time created by the play and shared by the
audience. When I directed Salesman in China, which was the
first time I had attempted to direct it from scratch, I became
aware all over again that that play is taking place in the Greek
unity of twenty-four hours; and yet, it is dealing with material
that goes back probably twenty-five years. And it almost goes
forward through Ben, who is dead. So time was an obsession
for me at the moment, and I wanted a way of presenting it so
that it became the fiber of the play, rather than being something that somebody comments about. In fact, there is very
little comment verbally in Salesman about time. I also wanted
a form that could sustain in itself the way we deal with crises,
which is not to deal with them. After all, there is a lot of
comedy in Salesman; people forget it because it is so dark by
the end of the play. But if you stand behind the audience you
hear a lot of laughter. It's a deadly ironical laughter most of
the time, but it is a species of comedy. The comedy is really a
way for Willy and others to put off the evil day, which is the
thing we all do. I wanted that to happen and not be something
talked about. I wanted the feeling to come across rather than a
set of speeches about how we delay dealing with issues. I
wanted a play, that is, that had almost a biological life of its
own. It would be as incontrovertible as the musculature of the
human body. Everything connecting with everything else, all
of it working according to plan. No excesses. Nothing explaining itself; all of it simply inevitable, as one structure, as one
