It has been more than a decade since the Golden Globe-winning Australian actor Anthony LaPaglia appeared on stage – and almost quarter of a century since he triumphed on Broadway, winning a Tony award as Eddie Carbone in A View From the Bridge.
Next month the Los Angeles-based Without a Trace actor will return to Australia to begin rehearsals on another Arthur Miller classic: the 20th-century masterpiece Death of a Salesman, directed by Neil Armfield.
Announced on Monday, the show will play a limited six-week season at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. In taking on the tragic, delusional Willy Loman, LaPaglia is ticking off a bucket list role shared by many a celebrated character actor, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy and Lee J Cobb.
“It’s a great play, a great role I’ve always loved – and I always thought it would be great when I get older to play it,” LaPaglia told Guardian Australia from his home in California.
In 2019 Wendell Pierce became the first black actor to play America’s fatally flawed everyman, collecting both a Laurence Olivier and a Tony award for the role. Australians of note who have tackled the role include Colin Friels and Warren Mitchell, the latter also collecting an Olivier.
Willy Loman is the kind of role that tends to attract plaudits to its interpreters, and LaPaglia has watched recordings of most.
“It’s been done quite a bit, it keeps getting done and for good reason,” LaPaglia said. “But I think it’s becoming more and more relevant, now even more than it was when it was first written.”
Loman’s obsession with being “well-liked” – and his belief that the key to professional success for his two sons, Biff and Happy, is that they too be “well-liked” – takes on a whole new meaning in the era of social media, according to LaPaglia.
“We live in a society that’s hellbent on being well-liked – as opposed to having a reason to be well-liked,” he said. “Just the act of being well-liked or the potential of being well-liked is enough.
“I have a 20-year-old daughter. I watch her go through her life on social media and I don’t judge it. But I know it must be a really hard way to live your life, every minute of the day; constant anxiety about not being connected, not being relevant, not getting ‘likes’.”
Although his career has spanned more than three decades, LaPaglia’s work in live theatre has been sporadic. Death of a Salesman will be just his eighth theatre role and will mark the 64-year-old’s Australian theatre debut. All his previous stage work has been in New York.
The actor doubted he would have accepted the challenge it if hadn’t come from Armfield, with whom he worked on the 2015 film adaptation of Holding the Man.
“He knows what he’s doing, he’s a tremendous director,” LaPaglia said.
“If he wasn’t directing it, I’m not sure I’d be doing it. When it was first offered to me I was scared to death and very excited at the same time. And whenever I’ve had that feeling in the past in my life it’s always been an indicator for me to do it and I haven’t had those two feelings together for quite a while.”.”
It was working with LaPaglia on Holding the Man that gave Armfield the idea to cast him as Loman. Armfield remembers LaPaglia as an artist of “clarity, strength, tenderness, and pain – his instincts are flawless”, the director said.
Some 25 years after collecting his Tony for View From the Bridge, the Adelaide-born actor is now the perfect age for Willy Loman, according to Armfield. “And he has never performed onstage in Australia … that alone suggests an opportunity.”
Armfield acknowledged the element of risk in tackling one of the most hallowed works of the 20th century theatrical canon with an actor 12 years absent from the stage.
“[Risk] is fundamental to it and what makes it thrilling,” he said. “But if you’ve got ‘theatre muscle’ and you’re a great actor, it’s not as if it withers away from lack of practice.
“This is one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, and it needs a great actor to shoulder it and release its power.”
Death of a Salesman will play from Friday 1 September to 15 October at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. Tickets on sale 8 June
