I recently took 40 of my Fordham University students to see “Death of a Salesman” at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, a new production by director Joe Mantello and the seventh Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s play since it was first staged in 1949. “Death of a Salesman” earned its iconic status almost instantly, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in the same season. A countercultural work of prophetic art, written in the face of the post-World War II booming economy, Miller’s tragic meditation on the American dream offered then—and now—a brazen critique of capitalism, exposing the merciless ways in which it devours human beings caught in its maw. I have long admired Miller’s play, but I entered the theater uncertain about whether the 19 to 22 year-olds I teach would find it relevant to their own lives and our current times. The good news—and the bad—is that “Death of a Salesman” speaks to all Americans as loudly and as clearly as it did three quarters of a century ago.
“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!” the 63-year-old protagonist Willy Loman laments in the office of Howard, son of the man who hired him 35 years ago who now tells him, offhandedly, that he is being fired. Despite his lowly place in the brutal hierarchy (“Loman,” suggesting “low man,” is named allegorically, as are a number of other characters in the play), Willy objects vehemently as his arrogant young boss strips away his livelihood, his purpose and his dignity. Nathan Lane, who plays the hapless salesman, is brilliant in the role, alternately poignant and pathetic in his portrayal of a man who has been emasculated, used up and left irrevocably broken by an inhuman system that cares nothing for his well-being, neither in body nor soul.
Willy Loman is deeply flawed and hard to like—by turns pompous and presumptuous, timid and full of self-hatred. He is rarely, if ever, honest with himself or others, a man who totally lacks self-knowledge and never achieves the anagnorisis, or recognition, that Aristotle claims as a key element of tragedy. In the painful, culminating showdown between Willy and Biff, his eldest son delivers the terrible pronouncement that Willy is a “nobody” and a failure, and that he himself is, too. Willy resists, cries out, insists upon his integrity and worth, as well as his son’s: “I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman!”—words that echoed through the theater that night, registering on our shocked and altered faces, as none of us really understood what they meant, least of all Willy.
Arthur Miller may not have been a religious man (he was raised in a minimally observant Jewish household in Brooklyn), but “Death of a Salesman” suggests that he believes in the holiness of human beings. In Christian/Catholic terms, the play affirms the imago Dei, the concept that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God and are worthy of love. No one is exempt from this—not the deeply flawed and sinful Willy, not his lost and inept sons, Biff and Happy (Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers), and not the faithful and fiercely loyal Linda (Laurie Metcalf). The Lomans may be lowly, they may not be kings and queens and princes, as are the characters in tragedies of bygone eras, but they are still holy and beloved. Despite the dehumanizing forces of capitalism, they retain this humanity, refusing to be devoured. Each character resists in his or her way—even if that resistance is wrongheaded, mistaken, foolish and even self-destructive.
Creatures of the system
Resistance takes various forms in “Death of a Salesman.” Perhaps the saddest character in the play is the ironically named Happy, who conforms to the system and attempts, rather ineffectually, to climb the corporate ladder. His form of resistance—dating and then seducing the fiancées of his superiors—is cruel, selfish and mimics the appetitive nature of capitalism. He is a creature of the system and vows his allegiance to it at the end of the play. Happy is a worse version of his father, who is redeemed in some sense by his love for Linda and his sons. Happy loves no one but himself. He delivers the cruelest line in the play after a family altercation at a restaurant, where the Loman men meet for a celebratory dinner that goes terribly wrong. One of the women Hap has picked up (Happy uses women in much the same way corporate America uses men) asks whether Willy is his father, and he replies: “No, that’s not my father. That’s just a guy.” Happy commits the deplorable sin of denying his own father and remains unredeemed through to the end of the play, a foil to Biff, who does arrive at some small self-knowledge and consciously resists the ruthless machine that has ground his father and his brother down.
There are a number of elements in Joe Mantello’s revival that make Miller’s 77-year-old play urgent, compelling and relevant to a contemporary audience. Among these is the spare and yet suggestive staging. The Loman home feels like a dark, industrial warehouse in late stages of disrepair, sparsely furnished and littered with tiles falling off the walls. The first action we see on the stage is the slow entrance of a vintage car, its headlights aglow in the darkness, which then comes to a full stop. The last action in the play proper is the car moving in reverse as Willy drives off to kill himself by wrecking the vehicle. The car is a constant presence throughout the play, front and center—a symbol of Willy’s livelihood, as a traveling salesman, as well as the instrument of his death; a symbol of freedom and the call of the open road, as well as a symbol of his entrapment, as he is forced to drive long distances to make a living, taking him away from his home and family and instead to cities and towns where he is alien and unwelcome. During the flashback scenes, we see Willy’s memories enacted. When Willy’s sons—younger versions of Happy and Biff—are waxing the car, the vehicle is bathed in a warm, golden light, as are the boys, lit by the false fires of nostalgia, which idealizes those lost days, those lost boys and the supposed innocence of a lost time. The car is a measure of Willy’s worth, his wealth and his happiness—a grim reminder of the ways Americans make idols of our possessions and our children, expecting spiritual fulfillment from those objects and persons they can’t possibly provide.
From the moment Lane, at age 70 the oldest actor to play the role of Willy, steps onto the stage, he is clearly an exhausted, put-upon man, a shell of his former, vigorous self, who can no longer do the work the system he is caught up in requires him to do in order to stay alive. He is trying hard not to give up, fights the frequent urge to kill himself and tries to maintain hope that his flawed and failed sons will succeed in life, despite all evidence to the contrary. His decision to commit suicide at the end of the play might be morally reprehensible, seen from some perspectives, as well as delusional—but it is motivated by love, the vain hope that the money his family will inherit from his insurance policy will set them up for life and spare them from being destroyed by the system, as he has been. Lane’s Loman is both pitiful and triumphant at the end. We weep both with and for Willy.
Laurie Metcalf’s is a transformative performance of Linda. Rather than the loving but wheedling wife evident in many previous productions of the play, she is a fortress of strength, defending Willy against the forces that threaten to overtake him, calling her sons to pay attention to their failing father in no uncertain terms, serving as the backbone of a lost family she refuses to allow to destroy itself. She, alone, at the end of the play, maintains her full dignity and carries that dignity with power and grace.
Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers as Biff and Happy are totally invested in their roles as Willy’s flailing, searching sons. They are smug, cynical, cruel to their father, disrespectful towards women (except for their mother, whom they idolize, despite Linda’s insistence that they not) and thoroughly dislikeable, like Willy himself, the man they try to distance themselves from. And yet, there is poignancy in their plight as young people trapped in a culture that offers no real role models for how to live a virtuous life–not unlike our own. Though they are men in their 30s, they spar with each other like boys, bringing youthful energy and wry humor into their tragic circumstances.
Hard love
These four actors carry the play, engaging in constant dialogue, soul-searching, accusation, lamentation and proclamations of hope and despair. They also argue furiously, reminding every member of the audience of the terrible wounds such family fights inflict on us all. Yet as hard as they fight, they also love fiercely. As Dostoyevsky once wrote, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” Theirs is hard love—hard to give and hard to receive, hard to maintain, but absolutely essential to their being.
If there is any moment of recognition for Willy Loman in the play, it is his epiphany in the course of the family’s final argument after Biff breaks down crying and throws himself into his father’s arms: “Biff—he likes me!” Linda corrects him, “He loves you, Willy,” and Happy chimes in, “Always did, Pop.” Tragically, this heartbreaking realization fuels Willy’s determination to commit suicide, to sacrifice himself for his family and, particularly, for his much beloved son. “That boy is going to be magnificent,” he proclaims, the sound of joy evident in his voice for the first and only time in the play, as he leaps into the car and drives it offstage. Soon after, we hear the sound of the crashing vehicle, the lights come up, and we see the family graveside, eulogizing him. And though we, along with Linda, Biff and Happy, lament Willy’s loss, we also must reckon with the reality that the last moments of Willy Loman’s life were likely his happiest.
The events of “Death of a Salesman” could have taken place 77 years ago, and they could have taken place yesterday, as well. At a time when income inequality is greater than it has ever been, when the American dream of homeownership is gradually growing less and less achievable, and when the volatility of our economy is a subject of daily concern, Miller’s play captures the anxious spirit of our own cultural and historical moment. It also raises the eternal, existential questions regarding the meaning of human life, the pursuit of happiness and the legacy we leave behind. Flannery O’Connor once stated that “the writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.” Arthur Miller found that location in the story of an ordinary salesman in Brooklyn more than half a century ago, and, lucky for us, Joe Mantello now brings the story to life for us again on Broadway.
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