Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman is perhaps the most popular--and in many ways the best--serious play written in America during this century. And it is fitting that it should achieve such notoriety in this country, because it is an intensely American play and comes to grips with some of the problems that the new society we have created in the last fifty years has spawned.

Although the play is often presented, rarely is a production seen with the obvious craftsmanship and creativity of the present one. Director Basil Langton has fully realized the author's attempt to give flesh to a social abstraction and on the other hand to give eloquence and stature to flesh that is at times all too solid. The author seems to ask, when and how can the sons of the men who carved a country out of the frontier with the strength of their hands adjust to the business suit and all the other impersonal appurtenances of a white collar middle class world. The leitmotif of loss of contact with the land resounds again and again until it crashes out in the final crescendo climax of the play. On one level Arthur Miller's play is one of violent social criticism if perhaps to call its roots Marxist would not be going too far.

But politics do not make drama. If we must be profoundly conscious of the world in which the Lomans live and move, it is as human beings that they interest and concern us. Director Langton seems to have gotten to the root of the personal relationships of the play. One can almost see it schematized in his mind: Linda--Mrs. Loman--at the center as the fulcrum and focus of the action, and perhaps in the larger sense the symbol of Woman as the base of stability in the family, her husband Willy at one end of the lever, and Biff, her oldest son, at the other end. She is the agent whereby the audience gains emotional entrance to the dramatic situation. Her sanity and sense of life amid the tragedy give a sense of reality to the maelstrom about her. Olive Dunbar gives a distinguished performance in this role. She exhibits superb control and dramatic sense.

Not less excellent is Thomas Hill as Willy. Mr. Hill is through and through a professional actor and his every word and motion suggest absorption in the role. Robert Evans as Biff lacks the polish of the two older actors and at times seemed to communicate his nervousness. No doubt future performances will give him more confidence in his part.

In the rather flat role of Happy, Robert Blackwell seems ill-at-ease at moments and rarely does his characterization catch fire. The role of Charley, the nextdoor neighbor, is carried by John Coe with a sure touch and necessary comic relief. However, he rushes through the beautiful and poignant requiem quite wastefully and thus loses some of the cathartic effect of the play.

Highly competent acting characterizes the small roles: Dee Victor as Willy's mistress, Frederick Warriner as his employer, and John Peters as Miller's most blatant symbol, Uncle Ben, who walked into the jungle at 17 and walked out at 21, and by God, he was RICH.

But although the individual performances in this production are memorable, especially those of Miss Dunbar and Mr. Hill, the large credit for its overall excellence belongs with the director. He gives the play unity, motion, and best of all, the sense so often lost that the actors really are speaking to each other--the essence of drama.

It is impossible to report on the tech- nical side of the production because rain on opening night forced the play indoors under makeshift conditions. However, the costumes seem without exception absolutely right.

Taken as a whole, and forgiving the occasional roughness that is native to repertory theatre, Group 20's Death of a Salesman is imaginative, moving, and mature theatre