'Death of a Salesman' Review: Nathan Lane in Arthur Miller Revival
From left: Christopher Abbott, Ben Ahlers, Laurie Metcalf and Nathan Lane in Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman.'
Emilio Madrid
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Few if any modern plays retain their scalding currency decade after decade like Arthur Miller’s heartrending commentary on the hollowness of the American Dream, Death of a Salesman. Joe Mantello’s psychologically probing Broadway revival takes place more than ever inside the head of its weary protagonist Willy Loman, played by Nathan Lane in an expertly judged performance that hits every lacerating note of pathos without denying the self-deluding character’s belligerence or entirely muffling the actor’s innate humor. He’s flanked by a superlative ensemble in a transfixing production directed with piercing clarity.
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In addition to being a play uncannily keyed into whatever period in which it’s staged, Salesman is also a work that touches different nerves depending on an audience member’s age. I’ve seen productions in four different decades, all with formidable casts, but I can’t recall one in which the jagged collision of past and present felt so unsettling, or the dissonance between comforting illusion and cold reality so cruel.
The tragedy of the ordinary man that the play represents is all around us if we care to look, and the failure of four decades of neoliberalism has laid waste to entire sectors while elevating others to create chasmic gaps of wealth inequality. Salesman has none of the rhetoric of an overtly political play, and yet it’s inherently political, exposing the potholes into which average Americans can so easily slip, dragging entire families down with them.
Mantello brings the time frame forward to the early ’60s, an era of postwar prosperity during which the middle class grew more affluent while low wage earners often got left behind. Marketing for the revival is built around the image of the Chevy that Willy, at the start of the play, parks in the garage of set designer Chloe Lamford’s cavernous, dark industrial space — a drab warehouse that contains the many prisms of the protagonist’s fragmented mind, draped in sepulchral gloom by Jack Knowles’ lighting.
The house in Brooklyn is conjured with minimal furniture and few props, but the family perched there so precariously is brought to life with startling emotional and physical vitality. The car — like the house, the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner and just about everything else of value that the Lomans have — prompts Willy to muse that just once he’d like to have something paid off in time to claim ownership before it breaks down or before its rooms are abandoned. The car is also the means by which Willy takes decisive action at the end of the play, one of the most shattering conclusions in American drama.
While the production is open to interpretation, Mantello appears to have reimagined it as the rush of thoughts coursing through Willy’s mind in the moments before his death. Happy memories sit alongside uneasy ones, stubbornly optimistic hope alongside crushing defeat, puffed up self-aggrandizement alongside abject failure and humiliation. Lane pours himself into the role with a forensic attention to detail — exasperating, pathetic and pitiable in equal measure.
Willy’s tragedy is not confined to any specific point in time. As reflected in small but significant anachronistic design choices, he is an unreliable narrator, a quality dictated more by helplessness than dishonesty. The subtle ways in which Lane shows the man being prodded or knocked sideways or outright pummeled by the conflicting thoughts crashing in on him are a large part of why your eyes remain glued to the actor even when you want to turn away in discomfort.
The great Laurie Metcalf puts her own unique spin on Willy’s selfless wife, Linda. She humors her husband — and perhaps fools herself, up to a point — by going along with his grand plans, irrespective of their tentative footing in the realm of possibility. The gradual extinguishing of that shred of hope, right up to her devastating final scene, is masterful. Linda loves their sons, Biff (Christopher Abbott) and Happy (Ben Ahlers), but she bristles with indignation when she feels that their recklessness shows too little concern for their father’s dwindling mental health.
While it dates back to Miller’s original conception, the castin