www.silverguide.site –

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.

The last Broadway revival, just four years ago, shaded the original tragedy anew by reimagining the everyman Lomans (say that name slowly … Miller was not subtle) as a Black Brooklyn family; in the staggering performances of Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke, certain elements of the original – Willy’s waning sense of self-worth, his shame at accepting money from a white neighbor, his concern over the degradation of his once aspirational neighborhood – took on a painful new resonance. This new production, in which the Lomans are once again white and the generous neighbor, Charley (K Todd Freeman), is Black, acts less as a restaging than as an evocative mirror, the opposite side of the resonant coin with a discomfiting visage.

From the very beginning, Lane’s Willy Loman fidgets and bristles with a sense of grievance: he worked the years, he sold the products, he bought into a broken system and merciless payment plans. He raised his now-adult failsons, prodigal Biff (Christopher Abbott) and perpetually overlooked, philandering Happy (a phenomenal and necessarily comedic Ben Ahlers), with the belief that they would and should be something. So what if he slept around on Metcalf’s Linda with a floozy work associate (played with distracting vulgarity by Tasha Lawrence). So what if the young Biff (Joaquin Consuelos) copied answers from Charley’s bookish son Bernard (Michael Benjamin Washington and, in flashback, Karl Green) to get the grades for a college football scholarship? Any cheating was all fairly in service of Willy’s prosperity and Biff’s inevitable stardom, or so Willy’s story goes. But home again together, the bills stacking up and the potential long squandered, no one’s buying it.

Willy’s unraveling, his perhaps intentional car crashes and ramblings to no one and intrusive flashbacks to sunnier times (delineated by that sepia lighting), are a tragedy of course; all those essays on the failure of the American Dream weren’t for naught, as one excruciating scene, in which the callous agency owner Howard (John Drea) unceremoniously lays off Willy, painfully reminds. But it also reeks of a very pervasive and relevant strain of ordinary white entitlement and masculinity in crisis. This death offers a eulogy, at once for a man, a dream and a curdled sense of a relative privilege. When Lane’s Willy, still desperately peddling his own wellbeing, accepts Charley’s money but not his job, his coded reasoning – “I just can’t work for you” – hits the audience with an audible oof.

That it works – that this show teases out disdain and sympathy for its family in equal measure – is a testament to Lane, for whom Willy Loman has been a career-long aspiration. (A production with Mantello has been in the works for over three decades; this show’s protracted path owes in part to its producer Scott Rudin, now in the midst of a comeback several years after allegations of bullying.) Lane’s trademark brassiness lends the character’s long-winded rants an improbably winsome sheen, his embarrassments a piercing ache. There’s a hypnotic rhythm to the madness of his Willy; when it’s time to go, he nearly takes the show with him. It’s a bravura turn, but the show’s heart remains Linda, whom Metcalf imbues with crisp practicality. Dutiful, entirely un-naive and blisteringly angry, she is devastatingly economical even in her most withering and emotionally prostrate moments, Metcalf conveying the exhaustion of a woman used to holding everything together.

Together, the two sell what remains, for all its nuances and boosted flavors here, a stark and gutting tragedy. I didn’t always want to, but I found myself buying it.