The Five Colours of White

Ink-and-Brush painting by Zhang Shuqi. (Photo: Jason Wang.)

In the glass-and-concrete halls of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, Zhang Shuqi’s work bursts with an urgency that belies its age. Echoes of the Homeland is a retrospective of a Chinese painter long overshadowed in the West. A native of Zhejiang Province, Zhang Shuqi (or Chang Shu Chi, 1900–1957) was hailed as one of the “Three Masters of Jinling” along with Xu Beihong (1895–1953) and Liu Zigu (1901–1986), pioneers who adapted traditional ink-and-brush to a modern world. Amid the fourth-floor galleries, his flowering branches and roiling flocks of fowl feel like a living ecosystem, each petal and plume pulsing with the tensions of war, exile, and cultural survival.

Lemons: Joe Mantello Directs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Laurie Metcalf, a carton of organic milk, and Nathan Lane in Death of a Salesman. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.)

When I heard director Joe Mantello was setting the current revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in a garage, I misheard it as the garage. So I assumed it meant the garage attached to the Lomans’ house. As far as reconceptions of classic American theater go, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. But no: It wasn’t the garage, it was a garage. But what set designer Chloe Lamford provides isn’t even a garage—it’s a huge industrial warehouse with a large rollup metal door and piles of debris and dirt everywhere. (That Lamford won a Tony for her set is far more unsettling than anything in the play.) The characters sleep on metal benches, meals at a metal table, and walk barefoot on the dirty floor. The structure earns garage-icity when the metal door ascends and Willy Loman drives his car into the warehouse to begin the play. (It ends with Willy backing the car off the stage. Symbolism.) I get that the America Dream is a lie, that Willie’s life is a big empty warehouse (I would argue that it’s actually a small empty warehouse), but do you need to hit the audience with a sledgehammer (and an ugly one at that) to make that point? Salesman isn’t a naturalistic play--there are flashbacks and fantasy sequences; Jo Mielziner’s famous set for the original Broadway production was widely seen as an expressionistic wonder -- but when the stage is so bereft of any hint of visual beauty or interest, you wonder why Willy doesn’t kill himself sooner.