Poor Willy Loman is once again trying to convince his lousy sons that when it comes making a sale, reputation is everything. He’s right, of course: The fourth Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” in some 25 years is crowding the cavernous Winter Garden Theatre with outsize reputations — at least two of which appear strangely at odds.
Most people off the street probably know that Arthur Miller’s 1949 tragedy is a Serious Drama about the American Dream. And they likely regard Nathan Lane, this production’s marquee man, as a certifiable ham of uncommon sophistication, poised, more often than not, with one eyebrow raised as if ready with a droll retort.
There are moments, in director Joe Mantello’s grand and spare production, set in a kind of purgatorial garage, when Lane’s innate funnyman persona casts resonant shadows. (The set is by Chloe Lamford, the headlights-through-car-exhaust lighting by Jack Knowles.) Willy laments to his stout and thankless wife, Linda (Laurie Metcalf, upholding her reputation as a Broadway MVP), that buyers on the road laugh at him — that one even called him a shrimp.
Miller’s traveling salesman is here something of a sad clown running out of gas. But like the handsome, burgundy Chevy that actually pulls up onstage (one curious anachronism among several), Lane doesn’t have the air of a beat-up workhorse. He is undoubtedly gifted and capable in the part: tender, forceful, and connected to the text. But his natural gentility is tough to dress down. It worked in his favor for his Tony-winning turn as the monstrous Roy Cohn in “Angels in America,” but buying him as an end-of-his-rope everyman taxes the imagination.
It helps that the action partly unfolds in Willy’s mind, as he is whisked back to the teenage years of his now wayward sons, dwelling on where it all went wrong. In the present, Ben Ahlers (of “The Gilded Age”) is a revelation as Happy, the people pleaser-turned-womanizer whose suaveness Ahlers tempers with an appealing glint of innocent mischief. But tension between Willy and Biff, the golden boy who failed to launch, is meant to be the drama’s revving engine and it lags. Christopher Abbott’s Biff doesn’t seem as disappointed with himself and disillusioned with his father as he does generally out to sea.
That may have something to do with the production’s treatment of masculinity. There’s a queerness to Mantello’s vision, including a blurring of gender associations that begins with its leads and radiates throughout, that ultimately drains the drama of its potency. Men are softened or eroticized, and their capacity for menace diminished. Fans of Ahlers will be pleased to learn he spends much of the first act padding around shirtless. Inspired by an early draft of the script, childhood versions of Biff and Happy are played by younger actors (Joaquin Consuelos and Jake Termine, respectively), and young Biff most often crops up in a midriff-bearing football jersey out of an Abercrombie catalogue.
When we find Willy philandering in a cheap motel room or threatening his wife, he merely appears grasping and pathetic. Lane offers little sense of the warring pride and resentment that Willy feels having failed his own idea of what a man should be. The moment when a grownup Biff nearly raises a hand to his father is meant to play like a shocking turn of the tables, but there’s scant evidence of Willy ruling his family with a firm hand. The casting of openly gay actors (K. Todd Freeman and Michael Benjamin Washington) as the neighboring father and son against whom Willy measures his success also appears calibrated around a tempered view of masculinity. (Interestingly, the casting is race conscious; when Willy refuses to work for his friend on principle, it appears to be because he is Black.)
The anchor in all this is Metcalf, who is characteristically precise and wrenching as the fiercely loyal and trodden-upon Linda, a reminder of the stakes every time she’s onstage — and not just because she’s the one crunching the numbers. The desperation of aging while rubbing two coins together comes alive when she’s around, which is essential for the story’s roller coaster of hope and defeat to land its emotional punches. The revival is worth seeing for her performance alone.
The other reputation hanging over the Winter Garden belongs to erstwhile megaproducer Scott Rudin, who this season is attempting a Broadway return after allegations of workplace abuse led to a several-year hiatus. On the heels of an acclaimed production this fall, also directed by Mantello and starring Metcalf, of the new play “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which nonetheless closed early, the stakes are even higher.
There’s a funny irony to a colossal commercial production that hopes to charge an arm and a leg for the privilege of seeing an indictment of capitalism. Then again, that indictment may by now seem almost quaint. It’s hardly necessary, for example, to fashion Loman’s young boss (John Drea) as a pompous tech-bro type — sockless, vested, and gripping a to-go coffee cup — to drive home the reality that we live at the mercy of a handful of feckless rich guys.
Most of us need no such reminder.
