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.
But most of all, it’s about how so many of us confuse capitalist success with the human need to be loved. The most successful people you know? Probably not the nicest.
All of that can seen in Cromwell’s production, featuring a spare and elliptical design from Anna Fleischle and a bluesy soundscape composed by Femi Temowo. Pierce’s stellar performance avoids the problem that beset Philip Seymour Hoffman in the last Broadway revival, which was that Willy cannot be so neurotic as to not be sympathetic, and it is as innovative in its own way as Brian Dennehy’s unforgettably muscular etching of Willy more than 20 years ago. Pierce, you feel at every moment, is playing a man doing his best with the cards he was dealt. He’s always present, huffing and puffing, improvising his way out of trouble, at least until time catches up with him, and hiding his pain. Truly, it’s a rich and moving star performance and the reason to see the show.
Alas, the relationship between Willy and Biff (Khris Davis) is less secure. Part of the problem is that Cromwell made a choice not to treat the flashback sequences in the play, which explain the present, as realistic but instead turns them into stylized snapshots. And once you have actors doing jerky moments like robots, presumably depicting the flashes of memory, the emotional key of those scenes gets lost and, frankly, this choice prevents this production from succeeding. Andre De Shields appears, sparkling mystically with diamonds, as Willy’s brother Ben. De Shields enhances any show but I’d rather have heard Willy and him just talk and probe the road only one of them took.
Certainly, this play has an expressionistic structure that has to be explored, but there’s nothing nonrealistic about the inside of Willy’s head, which is the play’s main order of business. In fact, it’s the inside of most of our heads and we have to recognize our own regrets; the vision of the past presented here feels pretentious, weirdly cinematic and, well, alienating. The actors, such as Lynn Hawley who plays The Woman, make some of it work, but the show still fall off the rails whenever Willy’s brain hits rewind. And that unmoors Davis’ performance as Biff, so his emotional journey is not easy to track.
In the present, though, the show is often superb: the scene between Willy and Howard, ruthlessly played by Blake DeLong, is riveting, amplified by unspoken racism as are the scenes with Stanley, played by the same fabulous actor, here taking what’s usually a plot functionary and forging a blend of obsequiousness, kindness and racism, all at once. As Linda, Clarke’s monologues are potent, rooted and deeply touching and as Happy, McKinley Belcher III brings far more to that role than we usually see; in this production, the relationship between Happy and Willy seems more central than between Biff and Willy. And Delaney Williams (also known for “The Wire”) is an honest, earnest Charley, a decent white guy holding up a Black family in crisis, understanding he’s probably next for a cemetery that levels us all.
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At the Hudson Theatre, 141 W. 44th St., New York; www.salesmanonbroadway.com
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