Thrilling New Life for "Death of a Salesman"

One of the things we theater obsessives love to do is argue about which is the greatest American play. I’m a Tennessee Williams stan and so I always try to get A Streetcar Named Desire into the mix. But I’m also the kind of traditionalist who feels that respect must be paid to Eugene O’Neill so I also throw in The Iceman Cometh. At the same time, I do acknowledge the gamechanger that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America has been and so I can make the case for that too. And there’s no way I’m going to let any debate like this go on without offering up something by August Wilson; you can pick your favorite but I’m going with his and mine: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which is scheduled for a revival later this month.  

However, I just saw the Joe Mantello-directed revival of Death of a Salesman that opened this week at the Winter Garden Theatre with Nathan Lane as the doomed Willy Loman and Laurie Metcalf as his long-suffering wife Linda and it left no doubt in my mind that THE Great American Play is this 1949 masterpiece by Arthur Miller. 

Salesman is no newcomer to my list of great play contenders. In high school I did a project that had me reading all of Miller's plays and even as a 16-year-old, I was knocked out by this tragedy about a 63-year-old traveling salesman who finds himself at the end of the road, no longer able to close deals or to pay his bills or to pretend that he has prepared the two sons he so loves to make something more of their lives.  

Over the years, I've seen a half dozen or so productions of this play. And I did an episode on it for All the Drama, my podcast on Pulitzer Prize-winning plays (click here to listen to that). And yet, Mantello's production has made me appreciate Death of A Salesman in a whole new and more visceral way.

Now I will admit that I was dubious when I first heard that Mantello was taking an approach to the play that would do away with a traditional set. And although I knew that Nathan Lane was a good actor, I had some questions about whether he could pull off this Mount Everest of a role. But in stripping the play down to its most essential elements, they have made it live up to its name. This entire three-hour production is set in the titular character's mind in the moments before his death. And it’s shattering. 

It actually helps that Lane, perhaps our greatest living comic actor, plays Willy (click here to read an interview with him). For even though Lane makes his entrance weighed down by large suitcases just like every other actor who's ever played Willy, I sensed the audience at the performance I attended waiting for him to lighten things up with one of his trademark ad libs or at least an ingratiating smirk. But when Lane did neither and instead dug deep into Willy’s sorrows, relentlessly snuffing out all optimism, I also sensed the audience gradually accepting that for many people like Willy the American Dream has drifted out of reach. 

Laurie Metcalf stays closer to her brand. Her Linda is tougher than many of the others I’ve seen but Metcalf makes her a fierce guardian for the man she loves even though she knows that he’s not the man either of them wants him to be so she is willing to do anything to hold him up, even when it means putting herself down.

The other two major characters are the couple’s sons Biff, a former high school football star gone to seed; and Happy, the baby brother who has inherited his father’s delusion that affability is the golden ticket to success. They’re not easy roles to calibrate and I’m usually disappointed by one or the other. But here, although I’d assume that the actors playing them had been hired for their TV followings—Christopher Abbott broke out in the Lena Dunham series “Girls” and Ben Ahlers has recently become celebrated as the 'Clock Twink' on “The Gilded Age”—both more than hold their own. 

At first I worried that Abbott's Biff seemed too drawn into himself almost to the point of catatonia but that makes all the more powerful his speech in the play’s penultimate scene when he forces the family to face the uncomfortable truths they've been trying to avoid. And Ahlers (click here to read more about him) deftly balances his own innate charisma and Happy's superficial charms in a star-making performance.

Jack O’Brien, a Tony winner for productions ranging from Hairspray to The Coast of Utopia, once said that when everything in a production works, the credit has to go to its director. And so despite all the talent onstage the MVP here is Mantello. 

The way the director has staged the scenes of Willy’s past and present— aided by Jack Knowles’ exquisite lighting and Mikaal Sulaiman’s haunting sound design—flows back and forth more clearly than they have in other productions, evoking the free association of memories and thoughts as they rub against one another in Willy's mind. 

And Mantello has added subtle contemporary touches by adding anachronistic props such as Willy's young boss's Starbucks-like coffee cup and by casting black actors as the Loman’s next door neighbors, whose successes make Willy even more uncomfortable, each quietly suggesting the timelessness and timeliness of the play.

But when all is said and done, it’s the text that continues to make this show so great. It’s become fashionable to bash Miller (hello John Proctor is the Villain) but even back in the glow of midcentury American might, Miller knew and tried to caution the rest of us about the fragile promises of the American Dream. 

There are stories of how middle-aged men who attended the original production sat in their seats and cried long after the curtain came down. During last week’s curtain call, the old guy sitting next to me brushed away tears too. I'm not one who usually cries in the theater but there was moisture in my eyes too.