whatever happened to willy loman?
by Douglas Messerli
Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman / New York, Ethel Barrymore Theater; the
production I saw was the evening performance of May 4, 2012
Holding back and holding in occasionally gives new meaning to some
scenes as well. Hoffman (usually an over-actor who here is utterly demure)
plays Willy in the scene where his son Biff (Garfield) visits him on the road
only to discover a woman in his room, with devastating understatement, so
skillfully in fact that it is hard to believe Biff when he later denies he is
holding a grudge against his father. Similarly, the more naturalistic
relationship between Willy and his ghost of a brother, Ben (John Glover), gives
new resonance to what is usually a booming statement of the new potentials to
found in Alaska. Under Nichols’ direction, the missed possibilities of Willy’s
life seem never to have been real options, his family and his desire to die
like the green-slippered salesman he encountered early his life dominating
Loman’s middle-class vision of the world. Here too do we perceive the other son
Hap (Finn Witrock) as a kind of latter-day carbon copy of his uncle Ben, a
fluttery profligate, perfectly willing to stand-up his dinner appointment with
his father as he runs off with the first woman in encounters, only to promise
again and again that he will soon marry someone. If mendacity rules the Loman
house, he is Willy’s true heir.
But finally, one recognizes, that such a quiet production also allows
one to hear all of the play’s many creaks and ghostly moans. It is strange just
how “stagey” is Miller’s Death of a
Salesman, given that this “realist play” was carefully grounded in everyday
life, when compared with the utterly theatrical and highly exaggerated
expressionist work of Tennessee Williams’ A
Streetcar Named Desire (a multi-cultural production of which is playing
just three blocks away, a version drubbed by the critics). Stanley Kowalski—a
worker from the lower class—literally soars as a character into the
stratosphere of believable American anti-heroes, while Willy Loman remains, 53
years after his first Broadway appearance, ploddingly grounded to the theater
boards out of which he sprung, a concoction of Miller’s deeply impassioned but,
nonetheless, theme-driven social consciousness. Despite his wife’s plea that
“attention must be paid,” time has turned our heads, and even the middle class
which Willy so poignantly represented in 1949 has now nearly disappeared from
American society, along with its mythical “American Dream.”* And, in that
respect, this play is not only dated, but outdated.
We might almost conclude that in this one instance Miller was prophetic
in his ability to foresee as early as the late 1940s that the remnants of the
vast American sales force—so crucial to the advance of capitalism in the early
20th century (and lovingly remembered in musicals such as The Music Man) would ultimately disappear from the American
landscape.
I suppose, had I been asked to sit down to dinner with either, I’d have
chosen Willy—which I almost felt I was doing in attending this production—who,
after all, was a coarser version of my own father. But would I have been asked
to go to bed with either, I’d have jumped into the sack with Stanley, just like
Stella, in the blink of an eye—even if Marlon Brando weren’t playing the role
that night. And as far as I'm concerned, that is the important difference between
Miller's and Williams’ visions of their relationship to their audiences.
*Some of these sentiments,
particularly regarding the disappearance of the middle class in relationship to
Miller's play where addressed in The New
York Times op-ed page essay by Lee Siegel on May 3, 2012, two days before I
wrote this essay. However, I did not have the opportunity to read Siegel's
piece until after I completed my essay, when, after sharing my sentiments with
Susan Bee, she pointed the similarities out to me.
New York City, May 5, 2012
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).
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