Death watch

Arthur Miller's portrait of a failed American dreamer at the Foothills

by Steve Vineberg

DEATH OF A SALESMAN By Arthur Miller. Directed by Danny Peak. Set designed by Sarah Sullivan. Lighting by Annmarie Duggan. Costumes by Ted Giammona. With Joseph Hindy, Mark Hughes, Kippy Goldfarb, Doug Shapiro, James Bodge, and Steven Barkhimer. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through February 28. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and no doubt it will be performed all over the country. The new production at Foothills anticipates by mere days a major revival in New York starring Brian Dennehy (which began in Chicago last year), and if we're very lucky someone will think of resurrecting the affecting TV production Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock -- who created the roles of Willy and Linda Loman on Broadway -- did in 1966. Many fine actors have had a swing at playing Miller's psychically decomposing salesman; and Willy Loman has long since become an emblem for a certain kind of casualty of the American dream. But it's never been clear to me where Miller wants to place the blame for what happens to him and his meandering sons, the high-school athlete-turned-bum Biff (a type the playwright borrowed from his hero Clifford Odets, who pioneered it in Paradise Lost) and Happy, the eager also-ran kid brother who emerges from his upbringing without a moral center. It's usual to see Willy as the victim of the play, but Miller, who drew from his decidedly mixed feelings about his own father, can't seem to keep his anger at bay when he's writing about this man, who is mostly an infuriating character. When we feel something for Willy -- as opposed to what we may feel for the failed jock Biff or for Linda, who lives for her husband and puts up with his self-delusions and self-absorption -- often seems to me to be the result of the inspired work of one of the actors who've taken him on, like Cobb or George C. Scott or Dustin Hoffman.

It's an odd play, I think, not up to its status as an American classic or even up to the standard Miller set a few years earlier in All My Sons. Miller tries so hard to create a mythic character that (as many critics have pointed out, most of them in praise) he never even tells us what the hell the man sells. He includes fantasy sequences where Willy talks to his diamond-rich adventurer brother Ben, the symbol for the success that has eluded the struggling salesman all his life, but these interludes never work in production, and they seem more dramatically dilapidated with each passing year. What keeps Salesman on its feet is the relationship between Willy and Biff, which was poisoned by the boy's discovery, his senior year in high school, that his idol was cheating on Linda while on the road. (In structure, this is a well-made Freudian problem play, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Detective Story: like the Ibsen plays that furnished the models for these American playwrights, it builds to a revelation of a long-hidden secret that explains the characters' behavior.) Whatever you may think of Biff's inability to recover from this particular loss of innocence, the scenes between father and son are the emotional linchpin of the play, and on some level, in every production, they get to you.

Beyond that, the best versions of Miller's tragedy are the ones that ground it in the most convincing realistic detail. Miller may have thought of himself as a mythmaker and myth explorer, but his skill was for creating believable dramatic scenes for Method-trained actors, and in fact his plays never work on the grandiose scale on which he likes to think about them. The problem with Danny Peak's production of Salesman at Foothills is that it isn't specific or realist enough. The actors move stiffly and awkwardly around Sarah Sullivan's set -- in the climactic meltdown between Willy and Biff, the two other family members seem to be pinned against the refrigerator -- and it's clumsy to have the supporting actors move their own furniture on and off the stage. When the actors smoke, they don't light their cigarettes; this is probably a courtesy to Foothills audiences, but when Happy is puffing on an obviously unlit butt and his brother joins him, claiming he can never sleep when he smells cigarette smoke, you feel like you're watching high-school actors. (Better to cut the references to smoking altogether.) These are details, I know -- but in the world of American realism, to which Miller belongs no matter how many pseudo-expressionist scenes he wants to play around with, details are everything.

The acting is serious but too much of it is mediocre. As Willy, Joseph Hindy seems terribly self-conscious, as if he were aware every minute of the enormous task he's taking on, and he gives too many of his lines the same intonation. Mark Hughes (Biff) and Kippy Goldfarb (Linda) are better, but Doug Shapiro seems way out of his depth as Happy, the younger brother. The best moments belong to some of the supporting players, who are more successful at filling in the corners of their characters. E Grace Noonan has a couple of very nice scenes as the woman Biff discovers in his father's hotel room in Boston, though I wish the costume designer, Ted Giammona, had found something more sensual to clothe her in than the shapeless, outsized slip she wears in act two. As Bernard, the nerd next door, Steven Barkhimer is hopeless in the flashback scenes, where he has to wear a bowtie and plus fours (this isn't entirely Giammona's fault -- that's the way Miller wrote the character), but when he reappears as the grown-up Bernard, he makes something quite touching out of his character's pained concern for Willy. And as Bernard's father, Charley, Willy's much abused but eternally faithful friend, James Bodge is completely plausible in every detail. His performance helps to bring Hindy's down to earth: their scenes together are also Hindy's best. I wish this Salesman had taken its cue from Bodge's instinctual reaching for the realism that has always represented Miller's own best instincts.