The Loman Family Picnic

Book excerpt: The setting is a new "luxury" high-rise apartment with Spanish decor in Coney Island, the home of a middle-class Jewish family struggling to put up a good front even though continually short of cash. The father, Herbie, who sells lighting fixtures, is chronically overworked and underpaid; his wife, Doris, tells herself (and whomever may be listening) that she loves her life-even though, as the play begins, she is shredding her wedding dress to make a Halloween costume; their older son, Stewie, eagerly awaits his bar mitzvah with an eye less on its religious aspects than on the potential loot to be gained in gifts; and the youngest son, Mitchell, is absorbed in writing a musical version of Death of a Salesman (entitled Willy!) for his class at school. While they all strive to present an appearance of contentment and closeness, the family is beset by underlying tensions which burst forth when Herbie seizes his son's bar mitzvah money and, after an unseemly confrontation with everyone about how the bills for the for the celebration should be paid, storms out of the apartment Mitchell's pain prompts him to show us a good portion of his new musical about the picnic the Loman family should have