You are invited to a special screening of
the production of the 2024 Obie Award winning play
Salesman 之死 by Jeremy Tiang
Followed by a Q&A session with the playwright
Date and time: 5-7pm, Wednesday, February 4
Location: CAC Colloquium Room
(3rd floor, Contemporary Arts Center, Claire Trevor School of the Arts)
Salesman之死 tells the story of the 1983 production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. Miller, despite not speaking a word of Chinese, accepted the invitation and travel to Beijing to direct the Chinese version of the play, working with a Chinese ensemble who did not understand the concept of “salesman” after the Cultural Revolution. This historic intercultural and bilingual encounter, with confusion, (mis)translation, and (mis)translation, becomes Tiang’s challenging and fascinating bilingual drama. The off-Broadway debut was in 2023, at the Connelly Theater. This bilingual play is in Mandarin (with English subtitles) and English (with Chinese subtitles).
Jeremy Tiang is a playwright, novelist and translator. His bilingual play Salesman之死 won the 2024 Obie Award for Outstanding New Play. Other plays written by him include A Dream of Red Pavilions and The Last Days of Limehouse. He was longlisted for the International Booker Prize for his translation of Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building and won the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel State of Emergency. As a translator, he has translated over thirty books from across the Sinophone region, including novels by Zhang Yueran, Yan Ge, Ping Lu, Lo Yi-Chin, Yeng Pway Ngon and Huang Chong-Kai. He is the co-editor (with Kavita Bhanot) of Violent Phenomena: Essays Toward the Future of Literary Translation. Originally from Singapore, Jeremy Tiang now lives in New York City.