I have never seen such a depressing production of Death of a Salesman as director Joe Mantello’s revival at the Winter Garden Theatre. My introduction to this 1949 Arthur Miller classic came in 1972 when I saw it at Baltimore Center Stage when I was 17. I knew nothing of the story and left the theatre devastated at Willy’s death. To me it was a sad play but not depressing. I felt this way through three degrees in English, one of which is an MFA in playwriting. Deeply flawed though he is, I cared about Willy and saw his humanity.
When I heard Nathan Lane had been cast in the role I couldn’t fathom him as Willy. He has such a distinct speaking voice, one that to me is like fingernails on a chalkboard, and he is always Nathan Lane no matter what character he is playing. I didn’t feel that way initially in Salesman but when he first raised his voice, which he does far too often, the voice I heard was Max Bialystock, his Tony Award-winning role in The Producers. I don’t know if I would have heard that just from having seen the 2001 musical but I had listened to the cast recoding a couple of weeks before I booked the show so throughout I heard Max. And except for a fleeting moment at the end, I didn’t feel his humanity.
I also didn’t like Laurie Metcalf’s Linda because she also did too much shouting, directed at her ne’er-do-well adult sons Biff (Christopher Abbott) and Happy (Ben Ahlers). A strong Linda is a welcome change from the doormat Linda I had always seen until Sharon D. Clarke’s spot-on portrayal in the powerful revival four years ago. When Wendell Pierce’s exceptional Willy hollered at her or belittled her she’d take it patiently and as soon as he turned away would offer a gesture or facial expression that made clear she wasn’t hurt or overcome by him. It was the first time I ever felt Linda loved him and in Pierce’s performance I felt he loved her. It was the only time I’ve seen this play as being about a marriage and not about a father and his sons. They had excellent chemistry together. I felt Metcalf’s Linda loved Willy fiercely but I felt no marital chemistry between them.
Adding to the gloom is Chloe Lamford’s scenic design that looks like a set from a gangster movie. What looks like a long-abandoned, decaying warehouse contains metal furniture that looks as if it belongs in a prison — a table, two benches and two straight chairs. Jack Knowles’s lighting is bleak and fog wafts around throughout. Willy’s red 1964 Chevy is center stage, the dominant figure, which makes sense because he arrives in it from his day as a traveling salesman to start the play and leaves in it to die in it, crashing it so his family can collect the $20,000 insurance.
Just before his exit, in the climatic scene when Biff tries to force Willy to see “I am a nobody,” I felt the strongest connection in the production when Biff got on his knees and cried in Willy’s lap. When he left, Willy sat dazed, marveling that Biff loved him.
I’ve never had much sympathy for Biff except when I saw Kevin Anderson in the role opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2012. I also saw the 1999 production starring Brian Dennehy. I didn’t care for their portrayals of Willy either. And I saw the show at Syracuse Stage in 1983.
I never liked Happy in any of the productions I’ve seen either because he’s such a cad, using women for one-night stands and boasting about it. In this production, though, he had a certain winning charm. Ahler’s baby face softens Happy’s crudeness. I love this actor’s portrayal of Jack Trotter on the Broadway-rich HBO series “The Gilded Age,” a servant who invents an improved alarm clock and becomes rich.
It’s interesting that the productions I liked the most were the two with all-Black casts. The 1972 show I saw in Baltimore was the first time for such casting in this country. Miller came to the opening. It took a half-century for Broadway to follow but that production had the same gut-punch force for me as my first. Both of those will always be Death of a Salesman for me.
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