Somewhere in New York, in the middle of the night, a tired man returns home from work. His shoulders are hunched, his gait shuffling and weary. Given the retro coupe he drives, the style of his briefcase and the fact that this is Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic play, he’s seemingly in the midst of America’s postwar boom, that “great” era so many would like to return to. But the stage at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre appears curiously period-agnostic. The salesman’s home is not a house but a garage, whose sheet metal door and pockmarked pillars bring to mind any number of industrial storefronts still visible throughout Brooklyn. In this revival of the great American tragedy, with stage design by Chloe Lamford, the Loman family shuffles and agonizes and rages about a “home” of benches, a table and that car in ashy grayscale. Their feet stir up literal dust. Even in sepia-hued, nostalgia-tinted flashbacks, they persist within decay.
I’m as skeptical of the voguish turn toward theatrical minimalism as the next person, but the purgatorial effect of this tremendous new Death of a Salesman, directed by Joe Mantello and starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf, is appropriately unsettling, at once an updated reading of the mid-century text and an answer to the outstanding question of why it is arriving on stage again, and so soon. Though Miller’s masterwork has been canon since long before I, like many US high school students, wrote compulsory essays on the failures of the American Dream, it has only been revived six times on Broadway – in part, because the three-hour play is a massive ask of audiences as well as its Willy Loman, a role that has challenged such venerated actors as Dustin Hoffman and Philip Seymour Hoffman. And in part, perhaps, because the play’s long arc toward utter humiliation is maybe not the message New York theater audiences want to hear.
