Death of a Salesman images
In this design I wanted to let the audience see—and distinguish between—the outer world where all the people live and Willy's inner world where his drives work themselves out. Rectangular, drab, horizontal spaces served for the first; blobbish, brightly colored raked areas, for the second.
The plan above identifies all these areas. We had to pack a lot of acting spaces into a rather small stage (which I describe and comment on in another page of this site). I used Jo Mielziner's no-walls idea but went beyond that and didn't even outline the house except with paint.
John, the director, found the plan still not optimal for his production concept; he used the Down Left part of the apron for some scenes and was then constrained to bring people into that area through Linda's kitchen. What's more, the Talent jibbed at the big ramps, and I was diffident enough to listen to them, a mistake I'll try not to make again. The long and short of it is that I got my little Stage Left ramp (for the Woman) but only the lower part of the big "Memory Yard" ramp at Right; the upper part became a level. And instead of letting Ben have his own entrance to the memory space, John had him enter at the Upstage end of the big level (identified here as Linda/Biff/Happy's in). It did not work much less well than the original plan, but as soon as I gave up that vast green raked area I regretted it.
Compare the ground plan with the next image.
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Set and cast images