One both admires and pities the intrepid theater company essaying Arthur Miller’s 1949 family melodrama-cum-classical tragedy, “Death of a Salesman.” After three-quarters of a century, it still towers above the American dramatic landscape like Mt. Rushmore. Doomed protagonist Willy Loman is our Lear; every actor wants a shot at him at some point. Contemporary thespians are competing with all the stars and visionaries that have gone before them, from the play’s original Willy on Broadway (Lee J. Cobb) and initial director (Elia Kazan) to the never-ending parade of revivals since.
The play’s over-familiarity creates an understandable pressure on directors to put their own imprint on the show and to reimagine it for potentially jaded audiences. In the case of Gwydion Theatre’s version, helmed by Scott Westerman in a compact space within the Greenhouse complex, the result is a work that succeeds intermittently in pulling us into Miller’s unflinching exploration of failure and despair within a culture that worships winners. But the three-hour-long production comes off as both over-directed, with too much going on at the plot’s periphery, and under-thought, never quite finding a propulsive scene-to-scene rhythm or coalescing into a fully satisfying whole. All in all, it’s a brave effort by an artistically ambitious and still-young troupe that, in this critic’s opinion, has bitten off a little more than it can chew with Miller’s iconic, demanding, multi-level masterpiece.
The play was written when the style known as film noir was at its height, and Sam Bessler’s grayish lighting and Catalina Niño’s monochrome set design have a hint of noir feeling. In film noir fashion, “Salesman” unspools its story forwards and backwards, as Willy—an aging traveling salesman nearing the end of his long and weary road—confronts the contradictions and frustrations of his sad, fraying life together with Linda, his loyal-to-a-fault wife, and his two adrift grownup sons, Biff and Happy.
Vainly trying to reconcile the two mismatched sides of his character—charming hustler and father-knows-best family man—Willy is clearly going to pieces. He narrowly avoids traffic accidents, loudly talks to himself (and to his dead older brother, Ben, haughtily portrayed by Chuck Munro), and slips constantly from a painful present into a haunted past. Unable to maintain his necessary illusions, tormented by guilt and shame, seeking a final redemptive gesture, Willy feels fate closing in. He is a lost soul, living in a dream gone sour, and those around him can only watch. As Linda famously says, “Attention must be paid.”
Director Westerman does his own rearranging of chronology, staging the play’s elegiac epilogue—Willy’s sparsely attended funeral—as the prologue. It’s a bold maneuver, one that unfortunately doesn’t pay off, as it neutralizes the play’s element of suspense. It also lessens the gut-punch impact of what should be the play’s opening tableau, when a drained, demoralized Willy enters with his two sample cases—representing all the heavy baggage he carries with him, including a checkered conscience—and announces to Linda in his poetry-inflected Brooklynese, “I’m tired to the death.”
There are other directorial touches that distract more than they clarify. The decision to have Linda float through various scenes as an invisible presence needlessly complicates the action and suggests an omniscience that her moments with Willy don’t possess—she is a witness, true, but more so an enabler, fending off Biff’s efforts to bring her husband’s pie-in-the-sky view of reality down to earth. Also, minor characters are given too much latitude, and the cross-gender casting of Charley, Willy’s neighbor and only friend (albeit a contentious friendship), clashes with the production’s circa-1950 atmosphere and adds yet another wrinkle to what is already a tightly packed, issue-rich drama.
The play’s standout performance is that of Jimmy Piraino in the critical role of Biff, the family’s eldest and favored son. A former high-school football star, Biff now works as a farm laborer in Texas, far from this angst-ridden family and their troubled past. Piraino acts his heart out as the truth-teller in a fragile family allergic to honesty, who is torn between his love for his parents and the need to escape the falsity and narcissistic grandiosity they foist upon him.
As Willy, veteran actor Rick Yaconis performs with urgency and power, but he captures only one side of the character: his vacillating confusion and weak sense of self. As an actor, Yaconis is just too dynamic, too together to communicate Willy’s exhaustion and sense of impending collapse. Still, he conveys how Willy Loman—like Donald Trump—constantly betrays his emptiness and fraudulence. Underneath his talk of self-reliance, there’s conformity and a certain criminality; beneath the confidence, gaping insecurity; beneath the bonhomie, an aching loneliness. To his credit, Yaconis makes crystal clear the soap-bubble nature of Willy’s hopes and dreams, his vulnerability to the despair lurking just below the surface.
Annie Slivinski gives us a solid, stoic but vocally unengaging Linda, a woman whose love for her suffering, hard-pressed spouse has overshadowed her feelings for her children. And the always watchable Grayson Kennedy, Gwydion’s artistic director, does well by younger son Happy, who has always played second fiddle to Biff within the family circle and now fritters his life away as a skirt-chasing, big-talking company man—i.e., a chip off the old block. Wisely, Kennedy doesn’t attempt to deepen or embellish what is essentially a two-dimensional character who serves mainly as a foil for his more reflective brother.
Is Willy a tragic hero or the duped victim of a shallow, self-centered ideology? The answer to this much-disputed question is an unambiguous Yes. At this point, as we look upon a ruling president and party that has militarized American exceptionalism and taken forceful measures to eliminate resistance to the dominant narrative, it’s clear that the muddled Willy Loman is most usefully viewed as a symptom of an ancestral American false consciousness. The Loman family’s aversion to unvarnished reality isn’t just a defense mechanism—it’s a kind of inverted virtue-signaling, a way of showing that their belief in the myth of America as the universal Land of Opportunity is stronger than their awareness of their own actual situation.
The evergreen cautionary message of “Death of a Salesman” is that when outward success and popularity become the sole measure of character, the inner self withers, and family and community life become impoverished. Willy Loman’s death is sad, but it’s the slow suffocation of his self-respect that’s truly tragic. As Willy himself says, in one of his rare thoughtful, unphony moments, “It’s a beastly manner of existence.” Gwydion’s production isn’t perfect, but it gets this point across, and it’s this that makes the show worth watching. Attention still must be paid.
Gwydion Theatre Company’s “Death of a Salesman” runs through October 26 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln. Tickets are $34, available at gwydiontheatre.org.
