The image on the Stratford Festival stage is familiar: the weary salesman in the Brooklyn doorway wearing a hat and holding a bag. His head is bowed, shoulders stooped, suit shabby.  This could be Lee J. Cobb or Brian Dennehy, but when this Willy Loman raises his head and speaks, he is Chinese and his words are in Mandarin. In 1983, the playwright Arthur Miller, accompanied by his then-wife Inge Morath, accepted an invitation to direct his iconic play “Death of a Salesman” at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. The man extending the invitation, the play’s translator and the actor playing the titular figure, was Ying Ruocheng, the leading Chinese actor of the day and every bit as formidable a personality as Miller. The project did not go smoothly. For one thing, Miller was not a stage director but an oft-irascible writer, preferring to work in solitude. For another, the Chinese did not have traveling salesmen, any more than they had capitalism. For a third, the project was so high-profile that the nervous Beijing government, ambivalent and divided about cultural exchange with the West, paid enormously detailed attention to what was transpiring in the rehearsal room. For a fourth, Miller was the most famous American playwright, probably ever, by virtue of having (a) been called in by the House Committee of Un-American Activities and (b) having been married to Marilyn Monroe, the most desired and objectified woman in the world. For a fifth, Ruocheng was a spy. Or a government communicator, depending on how you defined the way Chinese society operated in the early 1980s. Ruocheng had political ambitions — he rose to become China’s vice-minister of culture just three years later and was often seen as the principal cultural conduit between an emergent China and the broader world, maybe even the architect of as close as China ever got to glasnost. Both men wrote books about the experience. Miller did so right away, penning “Salesman in Beijing,” accompanied by photos by his wife. For reasons that hardly need explaining, Ruocheng took a lot longer. But in 2008, he wrote “Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform.” The “behind bars” part was a reminder that Ruocheng had been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. At Canada’s most important theater, the two memoirs (one widely read, one not) have been combined into a fascinating new bilingual play by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy. “Salesman in China” is a late-season opener in Ontario and a show attracting considerable international attention, as well it should. Also the director, Sy’s richly acted production is performed in both English and Chinese, with subtitles rotating between the two languages. Tom McCamus plays an unvarnished Miller, Sarah Orenstein plays Morath, Adrian Pang is Ruocheng and Jo Chim plays Ruocheng’s wife, Wu Shiliang. All four actors are excellent. Stratford has never attracted a bigger audience of Canadians with connections to China, joining its core fall group of loyal retirees. Earlier this week, the audience even included Dashan, a white Canadian comedian who is based in China where he has a huge following. In the lobby, he was surrounded by delighted selfie seekers. In essence, we watch the rehearsal process as cultural differences emerge alongside the neuroses of the two leading characters. Much revolves around Miller’s initial decision to give the actors little information about what he wanted them to do or be. Were they playing Chinese characters in Beijing or Americans in Brooklyn? On the one hand, Miller wanted them to bring their Chinese selves to the roles, being as that is what interested him and gave him fodder for his book. On the other, he didn’t like what he saw when the actors said that meant they would use Western wigs; the play makes clear Miller knew nothing about where he was, and had a condescendingly romanticized idea of Chinese theater (which also was common in U.S. universities in the 1980s). Meanwhile, Ruocheng, who comes off as the more sympathetic of the two figures, has more significant matters of realpolitik on his mind. But he is portrayed as a man with an artist’s soul and a need to challenge authority, maybe in the wrong place at not yet the right time. As a whole, the work is a reminder for Miller devotees (such as myself) as to how much baggage he carried in the second half of a career that peaked long before he even was 40 years old; his fame always got in his way. It is also, of course, a reminder of how much China has (and has not) changed in the last four decades. And further evidence of how Miller has always seemed to matter more at home than abroad. Derek Kwan and Adrian Pang in "Salesman in China" in the Avon Theatre at the Stratford Festival in Canada. (David Hou)The company of "Salesman in China," along with surtitles, in the Avon Theatre at the Stratford Festival in Canada. (David Hou)Adrian Pang (center) and members of the company in "Salesman in China" in the Avon Theatre at the Stratford Festival in Canada. (David Hou)Show Caption1 of 3Derek Kwan and Adrian Pang in "Salesman in China" in the Avon Theatre at the Stratford Festival in Canada. (David Hou)Expand The two Canadian playwrights, who still need to work on their final scene, work in a lot of dramatized history, including how the famously left-wing Miller finally realized there were echoes of McCarthyism in Communist China and how, in some ways, his new friend Ruocheng was not so different from the original director of “Death of a Salesman,” Elia Kazan, who had named names and who Miller had entirely cut out of his life. So what was the difference beyond the geographic location? “Salesman in China” also brings up the hidden son about whom Miller never spoke in public, as well as the guilt the great playwright felt at not being able to help or save Monroe — Miller being too chilly of an intellectual to tend to Monroe’s emotional needs. The extent of that guilt became all too clear to me when I saw Miller’s final play, “Finishing the Picture” at the Goodman Theatre in 2004 and interviewed the playwright, as frank and oblique as ever. Both Miller and Ruocheng are long dead now. At Stratford, you’re left mostly with an enhanced understanding of the power of the theater to bring people together. And with the limits it always seems to face. Beijing audiences certainly were confused by “Death of a Salesman” but they also were enthralled. The latter was also true in Stratford this week. “Salesman in China” deserves to be seen in Miller’s home territory. “Salesman in China” plays through Oct. 26 in the Avon Theatre, 99 Downie St., Stratford, Ontario; www.stratfordfestival.ca Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. [email protected]