Death of a Salesman

In the past twenty-five years, nontraditional staging of Arthur Miller’s dramas have sprouted in worldwide productions that deliberately set to remake the plays and offer audiences new perspectives on Miller’s complex characters and universal themes. For example, a 1995 London production of Death of a Salesman had a set designed by Fran Thompson that totally reconceptualized the iconic Jo Mielziner three-level set. Thompson’s design included three concentric circles on the stage floor, the outer two revolving for the various locations and actors, nearly all of whom remained onstage throughout the performance, downstage center for their scenes. This form clearly intended to imitate the action of the play as occurring within the imaginings in Willy’s mind. In Salesman’s 1999 fiftieth anniversary New York production, Elizabeth Franz’s depiction of Linda redrew the role, portraying the character with a strength and sexuality never previously depicted. Moreover, that production used a series of boxes moving around the stage to indicate the movement of memory inside Willy’s head. A 2005 Rhode Island College production offered an expressionistic presentation of All My Sons, and director Simon McBurney took a multidisciplinary approach to his 2008 Broadway All My Sons by blending in diverse media elements. In 2015, Ivo van Hove’s radical remaking of A View From the Bridge climaxed in a shower of blood on the stage, and his Crucible the following year featured innovative staging and costuming that removed the play from seventeenth-century Salem.This latest production of Death of a Salesman—its fifth New York revival—proclaimed its intention to reimagine Miller’s masterpiece by depicting the Loman family as African Americans for the first time on a Broadway stage. The show is a transfer from the acclaimed 2019–20 London production that received Olivier nominations and awards and has Wendell Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke reprising their roles as Willy and Linda. Despite the groundbreaking casting for the New York production, Arthur Miller plays have had all-Black and mixed-race casting in the past. Brenda Murphy, in her seminal text Miller: Death of a Salesman (Cambridge, 1995), which focuses on past productions of the play, lists a 1962 production at Clark College in Atlanta with an all-Black cast and a 1972 Center Stage in Baltimore show as the first professional production with an all–African American cast. She also highlights the 1975 Circle in the Square New York production directed by George C. Scott, who also played Willy Loman, and cast African Americans as Charley and Bernard. Salesman has been produced several more time since then with a Black Loman family, including a Yale Rep production with Charles S. Dutton (reviewed in AMJ 4.2 [Fall 2009]: 56–61).The 2019 Broadway All My Sons featured a mixed-race cast—after original director Gregory Mosher quit the production in a dispute with the Miller estate about casting both Ann and George Deever with African American actors (it went ahead with just George played by an African American). A 2016 production at the Stratford Festival in Ontario featured African Canadian actors in both Deever roles. Most Miller scholars are familiar with how director Michael Blakemore cast Black actress Josette Simon as Maggie in the National Theatre’s 1991 After the Fall that attempted to lay to rest the Marilyn Monroe controversy. In the current iteration, Director Miranda Cromwell employed a mixed-race ensemble, casting Charley, Bernard, Howard, and the Woman as white, choices that had the potential to provoke dramatic tension.The production embraces the Lomans as an African American family by including many elements of Black culture, especially blues and jazz music (composed by Femi Temowo), which operate as a thread throughout the scenes, the same way that Alex North’s original score for the flute music set the tone. But this production turns up the volume for the audience to understand music as the fiber of the African American experience. The play opens—even before the first spoken dialogue—with the cast gathering on stage singing the spiritual “When the Trumpet Sounds,” calling us all to a communal experience. The play also ends with music: Sharon D. Clarke reprises the gospel song as a plaintive punctation to her Requiem speech. However, it seemed that some of these musical choices were overdone or even unnecessary embellishments, such as a clarinet accompanying some of the dialogue and a band that played throughout most of the scene in Frank’s Chop House. They distracted rather than enhanced.Anna Fleischle’s nonrealistic set of moving levels and door and window frames sans walls serves well for the intent of this production to focus on the actors, although some of the transitions to and from Willy’s important imaginings could be smoother. The original 1949 production of Salesman used stark lighting to indicate Willy’s reveries, and this production raises the wattage by employing strobe lights. Combined with staccato movement and jerky, halting delivery of dialogue, the lighting indicates memory almost as electrical impulses that flash in the synapses of Willy’s mind.Cromwell’s decision to use a mixed-race rather than an all-Black cast had the potential to provoke dramatic tension in showing how the Lomans operate in a white world. Surprisingly, this was mostly absent in this production. Charley and Bernard are portrayed as Willy’s longtime next-door neighbors exactly as Miller intended. The Woman’s scenes with Willy enforce her longtime characterization as an airheaded floozie. The only scene that enforces tension between the races is the powerful moment in act 2 when Howard fires Willy. Cromwell made a purposeful directorial decision in portraying Howard (whom Miller conceived as a clearly entitled boss with little sympathy or understanding for Willy) as a racist who purposely demeans Willy as an “office boy” by waiting for him to pick up his cigarette lighter that—in this production, not in Miller’s stage directions—has fallen to the floor. But the scene comes off as contrived. I have seen productions, such as the 1999 New York revival, when papers fell off Howard’s desk and Brian Dennehy as Willy instinctively picked them up. There was an audible gasp from the audience who, of course, remembered Willy’s admonition to Biff not to do the same because they have office boys for that. However, one scene in this production that effectively addresses race is when Willy conveys to Linda how he overheard a buyer at the store describing him in a demeaning way. Various productions use “walrus” or “shrimp,” depending upon the physique of the actor playing Willy. However, in this production Pierce deliberately garbles an unheard word that clearly implies that the buyer referred to him by the N-word, which was a quite powerful moment.Miller’s plays have the reputation of straddling a very careful line between being family dramas and social plays. This production clearly emphasizes the family conflicts that have haunted the Lomans for the seventeen years since Biff discovered Willy’s infidelity. The striking performances of Pierce and Clarke are the dynamic center of this Black family. They are a loving couple filled with physical attraction, warmth, and an emotional bond that is evident by their dancing and passionate kissing. Clarke is not the weak, dominated wife that many critics have seen in Linda, but rather exhibits the same strength that Franz did in the 1999 production. Her scenes with Hap and Biff depict her as a strong and influential mother figure. Pierce captures the “massive contradictions” that constitute Miller’s conception for him, and moves believably among Willy’s many frustrating moods: his anger, his fear, his mania, his love for his family, his frustration, and his exhaustion with life. Both Pierce and Clarke are such strong actors that they elevate the performances of their cast mates to their level. This is quite evident in the scenes with Khris Davis (Biff) and McKinley Belcher III (Hap).Davis gives an uneven performance as Biff due mostly to his irregular delivery of lines that frequently break the rhythm of sentence sense. However, his final confrontation with Willy in act 2 is a powerful and moving climax to their father-son conflict. Belcher depicts Hap as the second son who exudes a lively personality and understands his place in the family and the business world. André De Shields gives an imaginative—almost campy—performance as Willy’s Brother Ben that was an audience pleaser, but I had difficulty believing that this depiction is the successful Ben that Willy would conjure in his troubled imaginings.Despite sociological and cultural studies about the achievability of the American Dream for African Americans, this production clearly shows how the Loman family occupying the Hudson Theatre possesses the drive for material and economic success and personal satisfaction that the dream offers. This groundbreaking production remade Miller’s classic and kept it a classic at the same time. The show is particular to the Black experience but also universal to the human experience. As audiences over the world have witnessed since the play’s debut in 1949, Willy Loman can be a small man, a big man, Black, White, Chinese, or Jewish, but he is still a human being and we continue to be moved by the terrible thing that happens to him.

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