"Death of a Salesman' on Broadway

Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman is more than a classic— it's the bedrock of our culture, the definitive expression of our morals and values in a century built on the illusive American Dream of equal opportunity and economic success. It's the dream that propelled generations of immigrant families (like my own) to strive for achievement and the good life. It's the dream— however imperiled today— that we still cling to, whatever the price, with the hope that our children will do better than we did.

"Attention must be paid," says Linda Loman of her salesman husband Willy, as he fights for his life. But watching Mike Nichols's reverential revival last week on Broadway, I was struck by the notion that attention doesn't have to be paid to this play, not really. We know it by heart and love it already. We've all been brought up on it, studied it in school for years.

Rather, the issue is: What's the value of a revival? Is it a production that (according to Webster) renews attention or interest in a given work? That's not necessary, in this instance. The play is us already.

Is it an opportunity for contemporary artists to explore a classic anew? That's surely a factor in the case of Nichols and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Loving detail

A production that breathes new life into a work? That sounds more like it.

But Mike Nichols's loving production, historically meticulous in every detail, plays curiously more like a museum piece than a fresh, dynamic new exploration of the masterwork.

Indeed, watching his star-studded cast take an emotional bow at the Barrymore Theatre, I was struck by their overwhelming sense of solidarity and pride, as if they were paying tribute to a play rather than recreating it.

Nichols has directed many notable American plays on Broadway over his illustrious 40-year career, most of them premieres (like Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple). In this instance, he has made the bold and unexpected choice of resurrecting Jo Mielziner's original 1949 set design and Alex North's original music, down to every loving detail.

In the process of his research he has done us a service— even if it doesn't necessarily enhance our emotional experience of the play.

Cobb and Beethoven

Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Arthur Miller and director Elia Kazan took actor Lee J. Cobb, who was playing Willy, across the street to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra play Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that afternoon, as Miller said, "to drink of the heroism of that music, to fling himself into his role without holding back. We thought of ourselves, still, as a kind of continuation of a long and undying past."

It's that "long and undying past," in Miller's words, that Nichols seems intent on recreating, at any artistic cost. Elia Kazan cast a 37-year-old Lee J. Cobb to play Miller's 60-year-old defeated tragic hero in the original 1949 production; Nichols has cast a 44-year-old Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose physical presence is reminiscent of the original "great lumbering Cobb," as Kazan called him.

Brian Dennehy (also a formidable physical presence) was a heartbreaking Willy in Robert Falls's powerful 1999 revival of Salesman on Broadway. Dustin Hoffman's pugnacious Willy was deeply poignant in the 1984 Broadway revival, although his diminutive physical type was far different from his predecessors Cobb and (in the 1975 revival) George C. Scott. (Interestingly, Miller had based the character of Willy on his own uncle, who was actually a small man, like Hoffman).

Hoffman digs in

Philip Seymour Hoffman is a great American actor: versatile, intelligent and resourceful. He seems deeply committed to this role, and (based on the performance I saw just after the opening) is still growing in it. Watching him dig deeply into the character, especially in the second act, you detect an unmistakable well of power in him that, once tapped consistently, will eventually bring forth a devastatingly moving Willie.

Some of Nichols's other casting choices are puzzling. In his illustrious career, Nichols has worked with the best (Burton, Taylor, Streep, Alda, Lemmon, Matthau, Nicholson), and certainly he's assembled the best here. Even so, the wiry and sensitive Andrew Garfield (of The Social Network) strikes me as too delicate for the blustering former high school football hero Biff Loman. Similarly, Linda Emond seems too solid and self-assured for the downtrodden Linda Loman.

But never mind. This Salesman springs to life in the dynamic of the ensemble, as incomparably guided by Nichols. As the play gains momentum in the second act with the firing of Willy and the exposure of Biff as a loser and a petty thief, as Willy's hopes and dreams dissolve, the family faces a final confrontation that blows the roof off this somber, staid production and radiates with the gut-wrenching passion that has made Salesman an enduring classic.

Tears in the theater

"You were never anything but a hard working drummer who landed in the ashcan like all the rest of them!" Biff cries out, pleading to his father to confront the truth. "I'm one dollar an hour, Willy" As Biff forces Willy to face his failure (as well as his own) to achieve the unachievable American Dream, I could hear weeping all around me in the hushed Barrymore Theatre.

In that moment, I recalled my own father, an entertainment lawyer and the son of an unemployed immigrant. He told me that when he went to see Death of A Salesman on Broadway in 1949 with his colleagues, they were all sobbing by the second act.

That shared catharsis across the decades, that continuum of theater history, makes one overlook some of the self-imposed constraints of this production and appreciate its ultimate contribution— namely, that attention indeed must be paid… to the American theater.

We Americans may have a young tradition, but it's a definitive one. With masterpieces like Death of A Salesman, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, we have a body of work that defines us— unlike Willy Loman, of whom it was said, tragically, in the final scene, "Clearly, the man didn't know who he was."♦


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