Few if any modern plays retain their scalding currency decade after decade like Arthur Miller’s heartrending commentary on the hollowness of the American Dream, Death of a Salesman. Joe Mantello’s psychologically probing Broadway revival takes place more than ever inside the head of its weary protagonist Willy Loman, played by Nathan Lane in an expertly judged performance that hits every lacerating note of pathos without denying the self-deluding character’s belligerence or entirely muffling the actor’s innate humor. He’s flanked by a superlative ensemble in a transfixing production directed with piercing clarity.
In addition to being a play uncannily keyed into whatever period in which it’s staged, Salesman is also a work that touches different nerves depending on an audience member’s age. I’ve seen productions in four different decades, all with formidable casts, but I can’t recall one in which the jagged collision of past and present felt so unsettling, or the dissonance between comforting illusion and cold reality so cruel.
The tragedy of the ordinary man that the play represents is all around us if we care to look, and the failure of four decades of neoliberalism has laid waste to entire sectors while elevating others to create chasmic gaps of wealth inequality. Salesman has none of the rhetoric of an overtly political play, and yet it’s inherently political, exposing the potholes into which average Americans can so easily slip, dragging entire families down with them.
Mantello brings the time frame forward to the early ’60s, an era of postwar prosperity during which the middle class grew more affluent while low wage earners often got left behind. Marketing for the revival is built around the image of the Chevy that Willy, at the start of the play, parks in the garage of set designer Chloe Lamford’s cavernous, dark industrial space — a drab warehouse that contains the many prisms of the protagonist’s fragmented mind, draped in sepulchral gloom by Jack Knowles’ lighting.
The house in Brooklyn is conjured with minimal furniture and few props, but the family perched there so precariously is brought to life with startling emotional and physical vitality. The car — like the house, the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner and just about everything else of value that the Lomans have — prompts Willy to muse that just once he’d like to have something paid off in time to claim ownership before it breaks down or before its rooms are abandoned. The car is also the means by which Willy takes decisive action at the end of the play, one of the most shattering conclusions in American drama.
While the production is open to interpretation, Mantello appears to have reimagined it as the rush of thoughts coursing through Willy’s mind in the moments before his death. Happy memories sit alongside uneasy ones, stubbornly optimistic hope alongside crushing defeat, puffed up self-aggrandizement alongside abject failure and humiliation. Lane pours himself into the role with a forensic attention to detail — exasperating, pathetic and pitiable in equal measure.
Willy’s tragedy is not confined to any specific point in time. As reflected in small but significant anachronistic design choices, he is an unreliable narrator, a quality dictated more by helplessness than dishonesty. The subtle ways in which Lane shows the man being prodded or knocked sideways or outright pummeled by the conflicting thoughts crashing in on him are a large part of why your eyes remain glued to the actor even when you want to turn away in discomfort.
The great Laurie Metcalf puts her own unique spin on Willy’s selfless wife, Linda. She humors her husband — and perhaps fools herself, up to a point — by going along with his grand plans, irrespective of their tentative footing in the realm of possibility. The gradual extinguishing of that shred of hope, right up to her devastating final scene, is masterful. Linda loves their sons, Biff (Christopher Abbott) and Happy (Ben Ahlers), but she bristles with indignation when she feels that their recklessness shows too little concern for their father’s dwindling mental health.
While it dates back to Miller’s original conception, the casting of younger actors in the Loman boys’ high school years — Joaquin Consuelos as Biff, Jake Termine as Happy — doesn’t add anything crucial. But it doesn’t hurt, either, and it helps distinguish the play’s present from its recent and distant past.
Abbott is a terrific stage actor with a brooding, unpredictable presence. He makes us feel Biff’s agony as a young man drawn to working outdoors with his hands, struggling under the weight of his father’s undying expectations. The path Willy has sketched for him, from golden-boy footballer to dynamic junior executive go-getter — well-liked and dripping with charm — couldn’t be further from Biff’s bitter self-assessment as a solitary underachiever. Like Linda, he occasionally gives in to the old man’s insistence and feeds the pipe dream. But Abbott never lets us lose sight of Biff’s awareness that his glorious future is a myth.
The extent to which Biff absorbs his mother’s stifled hurt when Willy constantly cuts her off in conversation, dismissing her opinions and shutting her out of his grand plans for the boys, is distressing. Doubly so when he catches on in a traumatic scene to his father’s infidelity with a drunken floozy from head office (Tasha Lawrence). The dismantling of Willy in his son’s eyes is almost as sad as the brief flashes of honest self-disgust that interrupt his father’s reveries.
In what deserves to be a breakout performance, The Gilded Age regular Ahlers (the “clock twink,” to devoted viewers) gives Happy a substance that’s often elusive to the character in other productions. He’s like a kid in a crowd, desperately bobbing his head and waving his arms in bids for his idolized father’s attention. But he’s also too shallow and selfish to take Willy’s mental decline seriously and too cocky to see that his own ambitions have no realistic foundation. Despite that, he’s never contemptible in Ahlers’ nuanced performance; his belief that he and Biff can team up again like in the old days and make their dad proud is genuinely touching.
Of course, that can never happen. Biff knows it, Linda knows it, and deep in his tired bones Willy knows it too, as he hauls his sample cases from his car and shuffles into the house one last time.
Miller’s mighty play perhaps like no other reveals the dirty tricks of a capitalist system that not all are destined to survive, in which every self-made man has a corresponding failure, chewed up and discarded.
That divide is laid bare in Willy’s visits — real or fantasy — from his affluent, aloof brother Ben (Jonathan Cake), or even in exchanges with his kindly neighbor Charley (K. Todd Freeman) and the latter’s adult son Bernard (Michael Benjamin Washington). Willy is quietly flummoxed by how Bernard’s path to success could have diverged so sharply from that of his childhood friend Biff. Having Charley and Bernard played by Black actors adds to the maddening pride with which Willy repeatedly refuses his neighbor’s offer of paid employment.
Down to the smallest roles, this production is astutely cast, and its arresting design elements add a suitably shabby grandeur to the play’s unsparing view of America’s broken promises. Mantello does some of his finest work in a heartfelt revival that will be remembered for the estimable Lane’s career-crowning performance. It’s magnificent theater.
Venue: Winter Garden Theatre, New York
Cast: Nathan Lane, Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott, Ben Ahlers, Jonathan Cake, John Drea, K. Todd Freeman, Michael Benjamin Washington, Joaquin Consuelos, Jake Termine, Karl Green, Tasha Lawrence, Jake Silbermann, Katherine Romans, Mary Neely
Director: Joe Mantello
Playwright: Arthur Miller
Music: Caroline Shaw
Set designer: Chloe Lamford
Costume designer: Rudy Mance
Lighting designer: Jack Knowles
Sound designer: Mikaal Sulaiman
Presented by Scott Rudin, Barry Diller, Roy Furman
