A live play, an endless search committee

My husband and I attended a performance of A Salesman in China at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario this week. The play, set in 1983, is based on the true story of the American playwright Arthur Miller traveling to China to direct the performance of his play, Death of a Salesman.

Relations between the two countries were so strained at the time that this was the only Western cultural or sporting event in China that year. 

Though Miller and the theatre troupe are keen to collaborate, they soon realize the immense challenges of working across the cultural divide.

I think that was when the play began to remind me of church and the time I sat on a seemingly endless pastoral search committee. 

In the play, it isn’t merely about translating between Mandarin and English, although that takes time and effort. (Fascinatingly, the set of the play has a raised stage with electronic subtitles underneath the actors who shift back and forth—sometimes in the same sentence—between English and Mandarin.) 

It's also challenging to translate between cultures. China never had traveling salesmen nor life insurance policies and did not have personal automobiles in 1983—all elements of the Miller’s play. When Miller opposes the wigs and prosthetics used to make Chinese actors look like white Westerners, the lead collaborator, legendary actor Ying Ruocheng, says Miller has a mistaken idea of what is authentically Chinese, that this costuming is in fact part of the culture. 

The actor and director come together around the theme—also pervasive in Death of a Salesman—of fathers and sons, the ways in which they fail one another. This is also true of the ways that friends let each other down, as these actors do each other because their differences divide them. Somehow in the end, they manage to find one another, and the play is performed. 

That was what made me think of my best experiences of church—which included the pastoral search committee I sat on for several years. Each committee member was chosen to represent our different interests and beliefs. It was not easy to work together. To be honest, there was at least one person on that committee I didn’t especially like for a very long time. We spoke what seemed to be utterly different languages from one another, even though we all used English. Some of us had profound theological differences on issues that mattered.

This was one of my best experiences of church precisely because of those differences—because there was no confusion about whether this was a group of friends. It wasn’t.

What held us together was our faith in Christ and the help of the Holy Spirit as we accomplished our mission. We had to find ways of working together despite our differences, and to approach those differences as assets rather than liabilities. We had to recognize that we might never understand one another on certain matters—let alone agree. But by the time we found a pastor, we loved each other. And we still disagreed.

At the end of the play, Miller and Ying are able to transcend their differences for the sake of the play, but as Miller and his wife leave the country, Ying says a word to him, and is unable to translate it to English. 

Sometimes we are unable to translate between ourselves in the church either. Fortunately, “. . . the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:26–28) 

Other times, we find understanding from unexpected places, from those on the margins. A touching line in the play comes from the youngest member of the theatre group who plays a minor role. She says, as such, she can perhaps see what others can’t. To the lofty hopes that the play can be an instance of all humanity coming together, she says instead that they are perhaps a group of ordinary people coming together in this place.

That’s as true in the church as it is in the theatre. It’s also what helps us find a way to be ordinary people engaging together in God’s shared mission rather than spending our time and energy trying to find an elusive and unnecessary uniformity.