Death of a Salesman

Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York

(212) 239-6200

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Seeing a great play shouldn’t be like “visiting an important national landmark,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Yet the esteemed director Mike Nichols has created a staging of Arthur Miller’s classic 1949 drama that feels fixed in amber—“scrupulous in its attention to surface details” but lacking all vitality. The actors contribute meticulous performances but consistently come across as if they’re mere “docents showing us through the Loman House.” Miller’s play is supposed to thrust us into the lives of a working-class Brooklyn family, not walk us through a museum.

I’m not sure I saw the same show, said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. There certainly wasn’t anything static about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Willy Loman. At 44, Hoffman would seem a little young to play “a man in deep middle age eroded by disappointment and the punishing reality of a withering job.” But the actor uses his relative youth to great advantage. Willy is usually portrayed as an aging giant, but Hoffman reveals the garden-variety bully underneath, a man “as much victimized by ethical blindness” as by the heartless business culture that discards him. This makes his downfall no less tragic. When his ne’er-do-well son Biff (Andrew Garfield) finally shouts at his father, “I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!” the effect is “shocking, terribly sad—and just right.”

It’s worth mentioning that, at 63, the play is pretty much “the same age as Willy himself,” said The Economist. America has changed enormously since Death of a Salesman’s postwar debut, but unlike its anti-hero, the story “feels more relevant than ever.” Wisely, Nichols never makes direct allusions to the present day, said Scott Brown in New York. “He treats the script like the scripture it is,” letting us draw our own conclusions about its relevance. That conclusion is inescapable: Willy Loman’s America is still our America—“our economy remains dream-based” and “delusion still flickers in every striver’s eye.”