What is it about father-son relationships that provides such good material?
Miller: The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they’re both about father-son relationships, you know. So this goes back. Ferris: : It is nothing new. Miller: It is absolutely nothing new. This is an old story. I didn’t invent it and I’m sure it will happen again and again. Ferris: : Three plays are usually named as the great works of the early twentieth century–your Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. I heard that after you saw Streetcar, you rewrote the play you were working on at the time, Inside of His Head, and that turned into Death of a Salesman. What did you see in Streetcar that changed your vision of your own play? Miller: Actually, Salesman was practically written by the time I saw Streetcar. What it did was to validate the use of language the way Salesman uses language. People have forgotten that, thank God, that Willie Loman isn’t talking street talk; Willie Lo
