I have three sons, and for most of their lives I have been trying, without quite admitting it, to make them into a story that ends well. So I was not prepared for what happened to me in the dark of the Winter Garden Theatre this summer, watching a man drive a battered Chevrolet onto a stage and slowly come apart. I had read “Death of a Salesman” the way everyone reads it in school—as a document, a set piece about the American Dream, a thing to be underlined and forgotten. I had never before sat inside it as a father. That, it turns out, changes everything.

The production is Joe Mantello’s, and it stages the whole play as if we are already inside Willy Loman’s failing mind, memory and present tense colliding without the mercy of a scene change. There is no cozy Brooklyn house. There is a car and a great gray warehouse of a space and the sense of a man rummaging through his own life for the receipt that will prove he did it right. And there is Nathan Lane.

It would be easy to praise Lane the way one praises a comedian who has surprised everyone by being serious, yet that would be an insult to what he actually does. Yes, we know him as one of the funniest men alive. But what he brings to Willy is not the abandonment of comedy—it is comedy’s underside, the desperation that was always the engine of the bluster. His Willy is a salesman to the last cell: a man who has spent 40 years being liked, or trying to be, and who cannot understand why the smile and the shoeshine have stopped working on the world and, worse, on his own children. Lane lets you see the vaudevillian still tap-dancing after the orchestra has packed up and gone home. It is superb. But it is likewise nearly unbearable to watch, because the better he is, the less distance you are permitted from the man.

What undid me was not Willy’s failure. It was Willy’s hope. This is the thing no one tells you about the play until you have sons of your own. Willy Loman is not, at bottom, a man destroyed by capitalism, though he is that, too. He is a father destroyed by the specific gravity of his love for his boys—by the enormous, distorting hope he has poured into Biff especially, the golden older son who was going to redeem the whole enterprise, who was going to be magnificent. Willy cannot see Biff. He can only see the boy. And that failure of sight, that substitution of the dream for the child, is the real death in the play, long before the car does its work.

I sat there and felt the accusation land.

Because I have three sons, and I know the temptation intimately. It is the sweetest of all the parental sins, and it disguises itself as devotion. You watch your firstborn do something well at 7 and you begin, quietly, to write his life. You attach your own unlived possibilities to him like ornaments. You call it belief in him. Sometimes it is. But sometimes what you are believing in is a version of him that serves you—a story in which his success retroactively justifies your own struggles, your own compromises, the sales trips of whatever kind you have taken and told no one were killing you. Willy needs Biff to succeed the way a man in debt needs a horse to come in. And the boy feels the weight of it and buckles, and the love curdles into the worst fight a father and son can have: the one where the son says, in effect, let me be small, let me be ordinary, let me be real, and the father cannot hear it because to hear it is to lose everything.

“Attention must be paid,” Linda says—Laurie Metcalf says, and grabs the whole theater by the throat when she does. But the play’s crueler insight is that Willy paid attention to the wrong thing. He paid furious, exhausting, lifelong attention to who his sons were supposed to be, and almost none to who they were.

I thought about my three boys on the subway back to my Manhattan hotel room. I heard very little of the subway noise around me. Rather, I thought of my oldest son, whom I have surely already begun to script. The middle one, who has spent his life being measured against a brother and who deserves, God knows, to be measured only against himself. The youngest, still young enough that I could, if I chose, decide right now to see him rather than to plan him. Lane’s Willy is a warning delivered from the far end of a life, where the loving-by-scripting road ends: at a car in a warehouse and a funeral almost no one attends.

And yet the reason the original title for this essay was “A Father’s Hope” and not “A Father’s Warning” is that the play, and Lane’s performance of it, gave me something back on the way down. Because there is a version of hope that kills, and there is a version that saves, and the play is about the difference, even as its hero cannot tell them apart. The hope that killed Willy was hope for an outcome—for Biff’s greatness, for the number that would validate the ledger. But there is a moment near the end when Biff, weeping, holds onto his father and says that he is nothing, that they are both nothing, ordinary men, and that this can be enough—that he can be loved as what he is. That is hope, too. It is just hope of a completely different kind, hope that does not require the boy to be magnificent in order to be beloved. Hope with no conditions attached and therefore no cliff at the end of it.

Willy cannot receive it. That is the tragedy—the gift arrives, and his hands are too full of the dream to take it. He mistakes his son’s naked love for one last endorsement of the fantasy and drives off to cash in a life-insurance policy, still trying, even in death, to hand Biff a check instead of a father.

I do not want to hand my sons a check. I want to hand them the other thing, the thing Willy couldn’t. And what I understood in that theater—what Nathan Lane’s heartbreaking, note-perfect ruin of a man taught me more forcefully than any parenting book ever has—is that the two hopes look almost identical from the inside. Both feel like love. Both feel like believing in your kids. The difference is only this: one of them has an exit, a condition, a price the child must pay to keep it. The other doesn’t. One says, become who I need you to be and I will be so proud. The other says, I already see you, and it is enough, and it was always going to be enough.

My sons will fail at things. One or more of them will, statistically, disappoint some ambition I have not yet even admitted I am nursing. They will be ordinary in the specific ways that all of us turn out to be ordinary, which is to say uniquely and unrepeatably. The question the play left sitting in my chest—the question Lane’s Willy asks by his negative example—is whether, when that day comes, I will be able to do the thing Willy could not. To pay attention to the son in front of me rather than the son in my head. To let my hope for them be the kind with no cliff at the end.

I don’t know that I will manage it. Willy didn’t, and Willy loved his boys as much as I love mine—that’s the whole horror of it. Love was never the missing ingredient. But I left the Winter Garden and called my oldest, who is just a person I am lucky to know, and I did not mention any of his achievements, and I did not ask about his plans. I just wanted to hear his voice. It was, I think, the beginning of a different kind of hope. The kind you can actually give away.

Attention must be paid. I intend to pay it to the right thing.

John M. Sandy is a judge on the Iowa Court of Appeals and the father of three sons. He studied philosophy and Catholic studies at the University of St. Thomas and writes on the law and Catholic social thought.