A Newly Illuminated Death of a Salesman

The cast led by Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf is superb, and so is the show’s secret star: the lighting.

I can remember, more than twenty years ago, in school and far from New York, absolutely thrilling to the news that there was going to be a new Long Day’s Journey Into Night on Broadway with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy and, most exciting of all, Philip Seymour Hoffman. We had just studied the play — along with the other heavy hitters of the midcentury: The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, Streetcar — and the idea of a place where these giants walked the streets, revitalized with exhilarating new voices again and again, was its own kind of American dream.

Now those streets are next door, loud and full of litter, and whenever a big commercial revival is announced, the voices I hear first are hardened: Do we really need another? Isn’t it just one more cash grab? What is this play saying to us now? Perhaps a new Death of a Salesman was always going to have an advantage earning our faith, given that its very essence has to do with belief and disenchantment, aspiration and back-breaking despair. In 1949, Arthur Miller envisioned the American dream as a kind of spiritual opioid crisis — a profitable system of addiction, this one to a beautiful lie, that was literally killing people. That ferocity of insight isn’t aging. “Sometimes I sit in my apartment — all alone,” says the salesman’s second son (called, with pungent irony, Happy). “And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy.” Oh, Happy. It only gets crazier.

Still, a production can enhance or obscure the relevancies of a great play, and what makes Joe Mantello’s new Death of Salesman land like a haymaker to the temple is the Beckettian space it creates both in and for the text. Chloe Lamford’s set is a kind of post-industrial purgatory — a towering, crumbling old garage, decades of dust and dirt gathered at the feet of its pillars. The necessary furniture is there — a kitchen table, a couple of benches — but it looks sketched in graphite or borrowed from a prison. In the dust piles, half buried, sit faded, rusted old memories: a football, a tricycle. Sweep it all up into one big mound, and you could plausibly stage Beckett’s Happy Days, another play about dreaming in the face of the abyss.

Miller himself knew that Salesman wasn’t straight realism in the manner we now tend to associate (simplistically so) with the midcentury canon. For a while, he thought about calling the story of Willy Loman The Inside of His Head, and even considered a set that looked like a huge hollow skull. Mantello has spoken about reading a sparer, more suggestive manuscript of the play, and of how he was struck by the lack of literal description in the stage directions: “What it appears Miller imagined was all created in light.” Starting here, he and Lamford and Jack Knowles (who designed this production’s gorgeous and eloquent lighting) craft a haunting, liminal environment: In their telling, the salesman may already be dead, and what we are witnessing becomes a Sisyphean afterlife ritual. In this gray nowhereland, Willy and his family will replay the last 48 hours of his life again and again, into eternity. Perhaps he’ll see the truth next time, or maybe next time he’ll win.

There’s always a metatheatrical rush in leaning into the idea that it’s not simply the actors who are performing a play multiple times; it’s also the characters, repeatedly trudging up and sliding down the same muddy slope. The risk in such a container is a sense of cleverness or of telegraphed exhaustion: Look at how smart we are or look at what a mythic effort this is. Neither encumbers this production. Its central quartet weaves something devastating together partly because they attack each moment with lucid, relentless precision, and partly because they understand just how much love is threaded through this emotionally violent play. In his untethered moments, Nathan Lane’s Willy wanders and flutters like a mad king while his wife Linda (Laurie Metcalf) and his sons, Happy (Ben Ahlers) and Biff (Christopher Abbott), circle him tentatively with all the angst and anguish of devoted knights: What is their duty? To protect this man they love or to stop him in his dangerous descent? Known for spit and steel, Metcalf provides plenty of it, but her Linda is perhaps even more striking in its tenderness and buoyancy, the character’s only means of throwing a lifeline to a man she knows is drowning. It’s one of the show’s most horrible build-ups when Lane’s Willy — riding a high of delusional encouragement toward Biff — keeps snapping at his wife, who’s bubbling with support, to “stop interrupting” him; suddenly, Abbott becomes a lion as Biff raises the back of his hand to his father and roars, “Stop yelling at her!” It’s a perfectly calibrated quartet, from Lane’s split-second pivots — excitement to cruelty to cowering — to Metcalf’s tenaciously cheerful forbearance to Ahlers’s chirping from the margins, the younger sibling who will never be as resented, or as adored, as his brother.

As in all tragedies of chivalry, the alliance will split. Linda becomes her husband’s unyielding defender as the tortured Biff — once the quintessential American boy — develops into a Knight of the Mirrors against his father’s Quixote, the adversary who tries to force the dreamer to encounter his own reflection. “You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!” screams Biff at Willy in the moment of his own awful disillusionment: Here, he’s not the drifting 34-year-old of the story’s present, played heartbreakingly by Abbott, but a boy (Joaquin Consuelos) who’s just discovered that the father who’s filled his head with victories is having a seedy affair. Jake Termine plays a younger version of Happy, and by putting four bodies on stage as Willy’s sons instead of the customary two, Mantello both dials up the evocative simultaneity and drives home the point that there are certain places we can never return to, certain people we’ll never be again. 

Meanwhile, Willy’s mistress (Tasha Lawrence) haunts the space like an invasive thought, her cackle echoing, her silhouette looming, and she’s not the only ghost moving through the fog. Willy’s older brother, Ben (Jonathan Cake, plummy-voiced and elegant, a cedar to Lane’s stunted apple tree), breezes in and out, always on the way to or from some impressive capital venture. “Opportunity is tremendous in Alaska, William,” he says, at once superior and magnanimous, a hypnotizing symbol of self-made success that Willy — who stayed in his little house in Brooklyn and tried to “build something” — can never escape. “Why boys,” Ben tells his young nephews in a memory that replays on a loop in Willy’s mind, “when I was 17 I walked into the jungle, and when I was 21 I walked out. And by God I was rich.” Rugged, confident Ben is manhood incarnate to Willy, who, in his saddest refrain, clings to the threadbare promise of personality like a bit of broken mast in a storm. “Be liked and you will never want,” he tells his sons. “That’s the wonder, the wonder of this country,” he declares, eyes glowing, as if he’s saying a rosary, “that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!” 

Knowles keeps the atmosphere leaden when the story surfaces in the present, in which Willy is 63, fraying with disappointment and banged up from several car crashes out on his long runs — events that his family is starting to fear aren’t accidents. But when Willy floats into a conversation with Ben or experiences a memory of Biff’s high-school glory days, golden light floods the stage through a high bank of dirty windows. So this small, aspiring man (“Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!” Biff shouts at him at the show’s excruciating climax) sways between light and dark, between the road and the deadly shoulder, advancing through his last hours on earth as if through the stations of the cross. 

A worthwhile revival will always give you the feeling — even more significant than re-seeing an astonishing play — of truly hearing it, and that’s what happens here. Again and again, as Lane moved with desperate, waning vitality from home to office to an almost unbearably painful dinner out with his sons and back to home again, I caught myself flinching at Miller’s words, coming out of these actors with terrible freshness: “Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken!” (Willy, irritated about the family’s busted refrigerator, which Linda is still assiduously paying off.) “Willy, when’re you gonna realize that them things don’t mean anything?” (Charley, the Lomans’ neighbor, when Willy is wracked by the betrayal of his snide young boss, whom he remembers as an innocent baby. K. Todd Freeman keeps Charley cool and worldly-wise but sympathetic, and the fact that here, he and his son Bernard are played by Black actors adds an extra wrench of meaning to the fact that Willy keeps borrowing money from Charley but belligerently refuses to work for him.)

“I’ve got to get some seeds, right away,” mutters Willy as his clock ticks toward midnight. “Nothing’s planted. I don’t have a thing in the ground.” The dirt scattered across Mantello’s stage is both garden and grave: It’s Willy’s tiny plot of land, where he’s hoped to grow carrots and peas and big, heroic American men, and where he’ll end up being buried. Atop it sits another super-significant object, one that’s even on the posters outside — the salesman’s car, symbol of mobility, forward and upward. The vehicle blinds us with its headlights as it pulls slowly into the playing space, and its shrouded interior allows for the appearance and disappearance of actors as if in a magician’s puff of smoke. Crucially, it’s not the Studebaker Willy really drives in his late middle age, but the red Chevy he used to own, a dream car for a dream play. At least, that’s the implication — maybe, as this deep dive points out, it’s a Ford, seemingly from the ’60s, not the ’40s, but such anachronism feels in keeping with the production’s slippery approach to time: Willy’s odious boss Howard, played with toxic smarm by John Drea, looks like a contemporary tech bro. He’s a messenger from a future of maximized efficiency and shareholder value, complete with thermal vest and Starbucks-style to-go cup.

Dreams blend and bend time; death annihilates it, and Miller’s play is both. “A salesman is got to dream, boy,” says Charley to Biff. “It comes with the territory.” But Biff can only love and hate his father; he can’t absolve him. “He had the wrong dreams,” he says. “All, all, wrong.” Between Charley and Biff, who can judge the right? Willy Loman will keep dying, and keep living, as long as the country that birthed him keeps peddling its own grand, intoxicating lies. 

Death of a Salesman is at the Winter Garden Theatre.

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