Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
Georgia Shakespeare Festival, in repertory through August 11
(Notes written in July, Year 2)
Confession: I went fifty-three years without seeing Salesman and now I've seen it twice in one season.
It's as great a play as everyone always said. It defined a new theatrical language that's still spoken and understood everywhere. It can be terribly moving to watch.
Because it's the age of their grandparents, the younger folks are flirting around its edges. The quick shot with the Super Soaker, then run away faster than the old fart can hope to pursue. But like a few grandparents, the creature holds onto its dignity. As you see Willy Loman unravel, half a century on, you still connect with him and you still fail to understand why he swims away from the life raft. These fifty years have added to the list of questions we know to ask—Linda, how do you feel when Willy tells you to shut up? Happy, do you seek affection in your sexual conquests or are you just running up the score? Bernard, do you resent your mother for dressing you in those knickerbockers?—but here's something important about the play: We don't know any better than we did what to do with the answers. The play didn't deal in answers; in a new world where everybody has them, somehow they don't fit these questions.
Tim McDonough gave an excellent performance as Willy. He understood all the questions and despaired as the answers eluded him. Janice Akers did not, I think, overcome the often weak writing in Linda's part but did establish a remarkable presence in Willy's disintegrating world. Brad Sherrill (Happy) and Daniel May (Biff) were delighted monsters. In Chris Kayser's (Ben Loman) mouth, "The jungle is dark but full of diamonds" became a shining promise of fairy fortunes.
In my view the show failed in one important way. In 1949 Jo Mielziner broke ground with a design that (by all accounts) put Willy's immediate world ("the" "real" world) on an equal footing with his world of memories, responses and drives. Every production of Salesman has to honor Mielziner without positively stealing his plans. The design for this production, by Leslie Taylor, used transparency and immateriality in the approved way but then went on to become a distraction, as if the Danish court had formed a line and made Dazzle Hands throughout Ophelia's funeral. The next-door apartment house moved up and down, and pieces of the Loman house ascended into the air from time to time. I conjectured that the doors were getting taller, Alice in Wonderland fashion, as the people grew smaller; but that doesn't wash, because who would think of these people as getting smaller? Fran said the house was flying to pieces as Willy's mind did, perhaps a more reasonable explanation, but it did not fly to pieces, it just rose into the air item by item. I found the house's behavior intruding on every scene and taking away focus.
This Salesman is worth the trip to Atlanta, but don't expect it to change your life.
Also in rep this summer: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Shameless personal promotion: Click here to see my pages on a community theater production of Salesman.
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Death of a Salesman