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.  

Why "Death of a Salesman" Will Never Die

My friend Doug came to New York last month to celebrate his birthday with some fellow theater lovers, including my buddy Bill and me.  Sometime during the evening, well into our cups, we all started debating which play is truly the Great American Play. 

There were strong candidates:  Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, August Wilson’s entire 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle. 

It’s hard to argue against any of those choices.  But I did.  Because for me, standing slightly above all of them is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  No play wrestles more affectingly with not only the American Dream of getting ahead but the American longing to be liked, or as the play’s tragic hero Willy Loman might say, to be “well liked.”  

Miller’s masterpiece, which mixes poetry (there are lines in the play as lyrical as any ever written for the stage) with a flint-eyed look at the quiet desperation of mid-century Americans that resonates deeply in our own unstable times, is now being revived in a much-acclaimed production at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre through June 2. 

It’s a high-wattage production, directed by Mike Nichols, who has said that seeing the original 1949 production was a seminal moment in his life (click here to read one of the many interviews he’s given about that).   

And Nichols has paid tribute to the memory of that experience with the wonderful decision to use the impressionistic set that the great Jo Mielziner designed for the original production and the moody interstitial music that the equally great Alex North composed for the play under the direction of the supremely great Elia Kazan. 

The roles of the down-on-his-luck title character, his long-suffering wife Linda and their hapless grown sons Biff and Happy who all come together in the family’s small Brooklyn home on what will be the last day of Willy’s life provide big shoes for actors to fill. And several of the fits are slightly off in this production. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman stands the most uneasily in Willy’s brogues. Although he is one of the most emotionally honest actors I’ve ever seen on screen, I’ve rarely believed Hoffman’s stage performances, which have veered towards the self-conscious as Konstantin in The Seagull, Jamie in Long Day’s Journey into Night, and a listless Iago in the Public’s recent production of Othello.

Hoffman does get some things right as Willy—the downtrodden gait, the bewilderment at life’s disappointments—but it’s hard to believe that his Willy was ever the powerhouse who single-handedly opened up the New England territory for the company that’s now ready to let him go. 

Linda Emond is more comfortable on stage but her Linda is so strong and capable that it’s hard to believe that she would have put up with Willy or the boys for all those years and far easier to think that she would have taken a correspondence course, got herself a job as a secretary and left them behind as the she moved into a nice little studio apartment in the East ‘50s along with other career gals of the time.

Finn Wittrock, a recent Juilliard grad who is making his Broadway debut, does nice work as the second-string son Happy (click here to read an interview with him) but the critics and nominators for most of the big theater awards, including the Tonys, have singled out Andrew Garfield, the young movie actor (he's taking over the Spider-Man franchise this summer) who's also making his Broadway debut in the role of the family's tarnished golden boy Biff.

It was hard for me to imagine Garfield as either the football hero son for whom Willie had such big dreams or the has-been roustabout that Biff has become. Still, he gives an intense performance that clearly moves people.  And I was moved too, although I wish Garfield, who is conservatory trained, had relied a little more technique to help ground his histrionics.

But no matter.  It’s Miller play that’s the thing.  And it remains great. And will so as long as there are those of us in the 99 percent.

A Different Life for "Death of a Salesman"

The great thing about a great play is that you can see it a zillion times and still see something different in it with each viewing. I was reminded of that after my husband K and I took the train down to New Haven to see the new production of Death of A Salesman at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

This slightly controversial version of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece isn’t the best I’ve seen but it touched me in ways the play hadn’t before and it made me wonder if Death of A Salesman isn’t the greatest American play ever written. This comes from a woman who loves herself some Eugene O’Neill, reveres August Wilson and would walk over hot coals to see a good production of a Tennessee Williams classic.

But more than any of the other contenders for the honor, Miller, particularly in this play, grapples head-on with the contradictions of the American dream and his everyman characters assume a grandeur of truly epic proportions. “He is writing as an American with an affectionate understanding of American family, people and their problems; and everybody recognizes in his tragic play things that they know are poignantly true,” wrote the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson when the play opened in February, 1949 for what would become a then-impressive two and a half year run.

The point of controversy about the current production, which is scheduled to run only through May 23, is that the entire cast is African-American. What black man, the purists asks, could sit in downtown hotels, ordering steaks, drinking whiskey and swapping stories with other salesman during the first half of the 20th century the way the play’s eponymous protagonist Willy Loman so fondly recalls? How many black boys, they want to know, could go west and find a job on a cattle ranch the way Willy’s beloved but feckless son Biff so desperately longs to do?

To which I say, don’t get hung up on the details. The yearnings and the disappointments of people struggling for a toehold in life are the same, regardless of skin color. Over the past 60 years, Miller’s play has been performed all over the world by actors of all ethnicities and it has hit home everywhere. Although I confess that some of what moved me in the Yale Rep production may have been the fact that the actors look like me. Or maybe it was that I am moving closer to the age of Willy and his long-suffering wife Linda and can more fully appreciate their wonder at where the time has gone and why they haven’t made better use of it.

This production came into being because the actor Charles Dutton, who got his start at Yale 25 years-ago when he appeared in the original production of Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, wanted to play Willy. (Click here to read a Playbill interview with him.) Dutton has always been a powerhouse of an actor and he is here too. But he is at times so commanding that his forcefulness masks some of the fragility that makes Willy’s fall so sad. And yet, I found myself wiping away tears as his Willy, small flashlight in hand, tries to plant a garden in the dark in one final gesture of doomed optimism.

Linda Loman is an equally tough role and I so clearly remember being blown away by Elizabeth Franz’s shattering performance when she played opposite Brian Dennehy in the 1999 Broadway revival that it took me a while to adjust to Kimberly Scott’s approach to the role. Her Linda is more robust, more practical than Franz’s or others I’ve seen. Scott occasionally stumbles—she proclaims, rather than speaks, the famous "attention must be paid" speech—but she still manages to makes Linda the stout-hearted center of the family. Ato Essandoh and Billy Eugene Jones are less successful as the Loman sons and resort too often to histrionics. Both seem to be promising young actors but their chops aren’t yet tight enough for such formidable roles.

That may be because African-American actors get too few opportunities to develop all the muscles they need for major roles in the theatrical canon. August Wilson has been a one-man jobs program for black actors but his plays and those by many black playwrights are rooted in the dynamics of race. These roles give the actors the same emotions to play. “You get tired of angsting about race on stage and having to dredge all of that race stuff up all the time,” Scott explained during the talkback session that followed the Saturday matinee K and I attended. “I want to explore other things. I want to do my Margarets,” she added, referring to the queens in Shakespeare's Richard III and Henry VI.

I hope she gets that chance. In the meantime, I’m glad she and the rest of the cast got this one with Death of A Salesman.