Theatre in Review: Death of a Salesman (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)

If anyone at this late date doubts the power of Death of a Salesman, they need look no further than the current Broadway revival. Mike Nichols' production combines searing insights with some questionable choices, but its most indelible revelation is that a play written to expose the fear and sadness underlying America's official post-war optimism speaks so directly and powerfully to us today. If anything, Arthur Miller's drama may be even more relevant to audiences living through our post-crash hangover, a time when many suspect that the American Dream is a game rigged against most of the players. When a play remains so current after seven decades, you can comfortably call it a classic, and leave it at that.

If that seems a tad obvious, remember that it wasn't always so. If you came of age in the '60s and '70s, you heard plenty about Miller's faults and practically nothing about his strengths. All too often, he was dismissed as a humorless bore, an editorialist in playwright's clothing, and a stodgy naturalist whose dialogue rarely sang. (I will spare you the details of the mind-numbing critical debate -- "Resolved: Death of a Salesman doesn't meet the true standard of tragedy." -- that dogged his finest work.) These were the years following the critical failure of After the Fall and later, less popular works. Largely because the lead role of Willy Loman has always provided such an irresistible challenge -- and thanks to acclaimed revivals starring George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, and Brian Dennehy -- the greatness of Death of a Salesman became impossible to deny.

Which brings us to Philip Seymour Hoffman; a gifted actor with the skill and ambition to take on the most challenging roles in the canon, he has perhaps chosen to play Willy a little too early in his career. It's true that, at 44, he has six or seven years on Lee J. Cobb, who created the role, and he's about the same as Dustin Hoffman in the 1984 revival, but, even with his slow gait, stooped posture, and graying hair, he's never totally convincing. A case of physical and mental exhaustion -- and, arguably, slipping into madness -- Willy should seem older than his 62 years. Hoffman's performance, for all its good work, never suggests a man who is bone tired in body and soul, whose mind constantly takes refuge in memories of better times because the present has become unacceptable.

However, the script is loaded with moments in which Willy, realizing that, at 62, he is underwater financially, cursed with worthless offspring, and unable to face one more day of glad-handing customers who no longer recognize him, bares his rage -- and here Hoffman really comes to life. His Willy needs -- indeed, is desperate -- to find a scapegoat for his soured dreams, lest he have to look inside for the truth, and these scenes burn with the unleashed grievances that he has hidden behind his salesman's grin for 40 years. Not that this is in any way a one-note performance: Hoffman brings a younger man's energy and a heart-gripping tenderness to the flashbacks depicting Willy's earlier, happier days, especially his intense love for his older son, Biff, a high school football hero with an apparently limitless future. (Even at this early stage, the second son, Happy, is cast in a supporting role, as Biff's best friend and acolyte, good for carrying Biff's football gear and little else.) These scenes are both touching and a little horrifying, as we see Willy installing false values in both his sons, teaching them to coast on a shoeshine and a smile rather than engaging in the hard work of being an adult. "Be liked and you will never want," Willy tells them, unaware that he is poisoning their lives.

It's not surprising that Hoffman does his best work opposite Andrew Garfield, whose Biff is wiry, edgy, desperate to put his finger on a dissatisfaction that he can't quite name. He fully conveys the panic of a once-promising young man who, at 34, can't settle down and, as a result, sees his life passing him by. He captures all of Biff's complicated feelings -- his love for the mother he neglects, the mix of affection and contempt he feels for Happy, and, most of all, the anger he holds against Willy even as he yearns for his approval. In the play's two climactic scenes -- a father-and-sons dinner in a restaurant that breaks down into bitter recriminations and the final confrontation, when Biff says the unsayable and, in flashback, we see the exact moment when Willy's house of dreams came crashing down -- there is an electric connection between Hoffman and Garfield, an alternating current of rage and longing that make horrifyingly clear how close hatred can be to love.

Perhaps because of the sheer intensity of these scenes, Hoffman's performance is a thing of peaks and plateaus. At times -- in some of his late-ramblings, for example, and his shame-faced confession to Charley, his next-door neighbor and only friend, that he has lost his job and can't pay his bills -- Hoffman seems to be making time a bit, saving his energy for the big moments to come. Still, even if I've seen more fully sustained performances of the play, I've never seen anything like the raw pain and white-hot anguish Hoffman and Garfield bring to the play's last half hour. And they're not alone. Linda Emond, as Linda, Willy's watchful, sorrowing wife, is a marvel of understatement, which makes all the more shocking the moment when she savagely pushes a bouquet of flowers out of an ungrateful son's hands. As Happy, a boozy, lecherous layabout who likes to kid himself that he is getting ahead in business, Finn Wittrock invests a slightly underwritten role with so many shades of meaning that the character comes to life in a way I've never seen before. There are also solid contributions from Bill Camp as Charley, whose gruff affection can't save Willy; John Glover as Ben, the long-gone brother whose wealth haunts Willy in the wee hours; and Remy Auberjonois as Willy's much-younger employer, who can't wait to get rid of him.

One of the best things about Nichols' staging, apart from the power of the big scenes, is the terrible sadness that suffuses the action, an unspoken awareness that Willy's pursuit of success has been for naught and a reckoning is unavoidable. There's something unbearably poignant in the way Willy clings to his Dale Carnegie dreams, even with so little to show for them. Clearly, the director has a deep understanding of Miller's script -- he has spoken in interviews of the hold that Elia Kazan's premiere production had over him -- and he has approached it with the greatest respect.

That respect apparently led to the decision to stage Death of a Salesman using Jo Mielziner's original set design, a tri-level, forced-perspective rendering of the interior of the Loman house set against a drop depicting the high-rise apartments that have, over the years, hemmed it in. It's a brave choice, and it's hard not to have profoundly mixed emotions about it. It was a groundbreaking design in its time, and it played a key role in facilitating the cinematic structure of Miller's script, allowing the action to move across many locations and from past to present in a seamless flow. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to see a first-class rendering of a Mielziner design on a Broadway stage, and I can't imagine any Lighting&Sound America reader who wouldn't jump at the chance to experience it. At the same time, it seems jarringly old-fashioned. I can't shake the conviction that theatre design is among the most evanescent of art forms; it's a key tool for communicating a classic play to a contemporary audience. One reason why plays are classics is because they respond to the theatre-making tools of subsequent generations, and there's a sense in which the decision to use the Mielziner set is an abdication of the responsibility to present Death of a Salesman in a meaningful way for today's audiences. (Interestingly, Nichols has stated in interviews that he gave the actors very little in the way of blocking, as the set practically dictated where they had to stand in any given scene.) Anyway, it's a fascinating one-off and it makes the production a must-see for anyone interested in the history of theatre set design.

Also, Brian MacDevitt, the lighting designer, has stunningly recreated one of Mielziner's key effects, covering the stage with warm light and leaf patterns during scenes depicting Willy's happy memories and gradually fading out to a much colder look as the past gives way to the present. He also provides a cheerless dawn effect for the day of Willy's funeral, and aids the flow of the action using a series of elegant crossfades. Ann Roth's costumes have a nice period feel, and Scott Lehrer's sound design provides a number of sensitively rendered effects as well as reinforcement for Alex North's melancholy incidental music (another element taken from Kazan's production).

It's interesting to see Death of Salesman on Broadway in the same season as a revival of Follies, as both of them grapple with questions that have bedeviled American playwrights since forever. Americans are taught to believe in the power of dreams, the possibility of reinvention, the power of the second -- and third and fourth-- chance. But dreams have a way of turning into illusions, acting as a drug and blinding one to the reality of one's life. It's an issue that never loses its relevance, as this production proves beyond a doubt.--David Barbour