NEW YORK — Arthur Miller would, it’s reasonable to assume, have been delighted at the idea of a Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” with an all-Black Loman family, especially with Wendell Pierce (”The Wire”) swinging for the fences in the starring role and Sharon D. Clarke playing the rock-like woman stoically at his side. It only intensifies his masterful play, which needed to be better trusted in the Broadway revival from the U.K. director Miranda Cromwell that opened here Sunday night.
Miller’s 1949 play, arguably the greatest American dramatic work of the 20th century and yet also a millstone around the late writer’s neck as he struggled to compete with his own astonishingly prolific youth, was written to argue that tragedies did not need to concern themselves only with princes and kings. Especially in America.
Ordinary folk who go to work and strive to get ahead, Miller argued, had magnitude too. Representative magnitude. Their individual lives may not change the world but, taken together, their human condition mattered. Attention must be paid. Willy Loman is a salesman (the play doesn’t really say what he sells and it doesn’t matter), but he’s also every working stiff whose employer sucks out the pulp and then throws away the peel when their worker starts slowing down. And, of course, it’s a play about the potential toxicity of fathers and sons, about the danger of unreasonable expectations, moral failings and agonizing regret.
