THIS GREAT COUNTRY

From Theater of the Unimpressed by Jordan Tannahill (Coach House Books; 2015.):

“I was reminded while watching the show that Death of a Salesman is a story that America owns collectively. It’s a play so canonical that it embodies both our conception of America and America’s conception of itself. And America is no longer – if it ever truly was – embodied by the white, suburban nuclear family. I watched in amazement as 600 HIGHWAYMEN radically and refreshingly transformed the play into a portrait of America’s diverse working class. Far from offering us a mothballed post-war period piece, This Great Country intrinsically understood Miller’s original text as an ageless parable for the fallacy of the promise of the American Dream, and its gender-blind, age-blind and colour-blind casting enhanced both its timeliness and timelessness.”

“This Great Country was the living embodiment of the theatrical ideal: a space where anyone can come together and confront that which oppresses them. Theatre as a radical space of togetherness, where we become other people to unpack the complexities of being ourselves, of being human.”

Performed by:

Design by:
Georgia Young, Megan Reilly

Assistant Directors:
Leigh Fulcher, Megan McQuaid

Supported with an Emergency Grant from Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Performed by:

Design by:
Eric Southern, Asta Hostetter, Gavin Price

Like so many others, we’ve always had a strong connection with Death of a Salesman. In 2012 we began early investigations into the story in Austin, Texas. We assembled a group of people to engage with us and the text. It became clear that in the era of shifting economics, the vanishing middle class, and the struggle of so many to reach stable ground, everyone we met felt a personal connection to Death of a Salesman.

In our version, theatrical artifice is stripped away, pruned to create a vacuum within which we can truly see these people, in this room, at this moment. In an art of subtraction, we removed anything that stood between the audience and the performers, foregrounding the immediacy and reality of the encounter between audience, performer, and text.

This Salesman restores to the play a sense of instability. It isn’t just the characters feeling this precarity, but the audience, as well. Other productions of Death of a Salesman focus on grounding the play in an aesthetic of realism; ours fashions the text as poetry, asking the audience to meet the play halfway to place themselves imaginatively inside the story. It does so to remind us that our focus is needed, that attention must be paid.

We first performed the show in a 4,000 square-foot bingo hall, and then the following year, in a vacant shopping mall in lower Manhattan with the East River and New York skyline as the background.