Girl Friday Productions returns under new leadership with Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman, directed by Megan K. Pence. The Twin Cities premiere is playing at Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul through October 4.
The play takes us back to the world of Death of a Salesman, but this time the women are at the center. A wife tracks down the woman who is having an affair with her husband, and the two women are forced into a conversation that goes beyond the affair itself. The play looks at marriage and the expectations placed on women, as well as the question of what happiness means within those expectations.
Death of a Salesman was in the back of my mind throughout the performance. That connection is part of what makes the premise interesting, but it also made me wonder how much familiarity with Miller's play affects the experience of Wife of a Salesman. The women are at the center of this story, but their connection to each other still comes through a man.
I wanted to know more about these women outside of the conflict that brought them together. I understood why they were there and what they were arguing about, but I was curious about who they were before this confrontation. What were their lives like outside of being someone's wife or someone's mistress? What did they want for themselves?
Mo Perry played The Wife, Hannah Steblay played The Mistress and Craig Johnson played Jim. Perry brought a stern, energetic quality to The Wife that immediately grabbed my attention. There was a forcefulness to the performance that made me sit up a little straighter and pay attention whenever Perry was onstage.
The play also moves between the historical story and a contemporary, meta-theatrical layer. At one point the action stops and the fourth wall is broken, which changed the way I was looking at what I had been watching. When the play moved into the contemporary timeline, I found myself wishing I could see a character dealing with a similar situation to the one the two women in the original story were facing. I was curious about what an affair like this might look like for women living in the present day, and how the choices surrounding it might be different.
That was one of the places where my curiosity about the play really kicked in. I wondered what it would have been like to see the historical and contemporary experiences placed more directly alongside each other. For me, that might have created an even stronger connection between the women and the questions the play raises about how much has changed for women, and how much hasn't.
That feeling was also connected to the space. Gremlin Theatre has an unusual U-shaped seating arrangement, and I've seen other productions there that used the space in ways that made me feel very aware of the actors moving around the audience. In this production, I sometimes felt more enclosed. The industrial, warehouse-like lighting added to that feeling for me.
What stayed with me most was my curiosity about the women themselves. Wife of a Salesman puts them in the middle of a story that we already know from another perspective, and I wanted to look beyond that original story and understand these women on their own terms.
Wife of a Salesman runs at Gremlin Theatre through October 4.
