Arthur Miller | Death of a Salesman / 2012

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

 

As Ben Brantley noted in his New York Times review of this revival of the noted American play, Death of a Salesman, one gets shivers from this production from the first rise of the curtain just to be able to see the magnificent set from the original production by Jo Mielziner and hear the original score by Alex North. In some respects, this entire production, directed by the renowned Mike Nichols, seems a bit like a museum piece as the obviously able cast of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Linda Emond, and Andrew Garfield tiptoe through their lines with a kind of muted reverie. One certainly can respect Nichols’ quiet reverence for the great American play, given the many boisterous and mannered productions, such as Dustin Hoffman’s quirky 1984 interpretation (I saw only a filmed version of the play), that have come before it; and, every so often, Nichols’ rendition soars in its dramatic intensity. Andrew Garfield’s tearful embracement of Willy as he admits his life’s failures brings tears to anyone’s eyes who still has the capacity to feel. But for much of the production I felt almost as Willy’s wife, Linda, admits in one of the last lines in the play: “Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry.”

 

    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.

    Today I have traveled to New York to spend a few minutes as a publisher with my sales representatives, among the very last of that dinosaur species. Within just a few years, as we know in our bones, all personal sales people will have disappeared, to be replaced with the computer and other as yet unimagined devices. Willy Loman must seem to most younger viewers—very few of whom made up the audience of the Friday evening performance of Miller’s play—as unrecognizable as a typewriter, an obsolete thing of a forgotten past, while the Stanley Kowalskis of the world, outrageously larger-than-life second generation immigrant Koreans, Armenians, Haitians, Mexicans, Russians, Indians, Pakistanis and others—sexually dynamic men and women temporarily locked into poverty—still exist in our cultures by the millions. One might simply summarize the differences between these two mid-20th century US playwrights by saying that while Miller focused on the aspirations of a man seeking a petit-bourgeois existence, Williams—as always, embracing the wretchedly comic outsiders—put all his chips on a man of sweat who preferred to bathe in the sappy fizz of a beer while facing brutal reality.

 

    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).