Death Takes a Holiday

There are a few plays which are so starkly conceived and finely wrought by the author that one expects them to burn star-like upon the stage with their own illumination, with little more help from their actors than a faithful rendition. Death of a Salesman is such a play. Arthur Miller has fashioned Willy Loman on paper at once so palpable and so evocative that he has a real presence in two dimensions even before he has been thrust into the third. Audiences do not come to a new production of Death in hopes of being shown an unsuspected depth in Willy's character. They come because there is a strength to be gotten from plumbing those already-discovered depths with others--a trip we usually have to take alone under less voluntary circumstances.

Willy is a man who, in Mark Twain's words, aimed for the palace and got drowned in the sewer. Haunted by the specter of success looming before him, his mind concocts a thousand fool-proof schemes by which the carrot shall be his, while his body stands rooted in paralytic fear lest he should try and fail, or worse yet, succeed, only to taste the paltry fare we call success. Around him is his family, whose empty stomachs have been nurtured on his unsubstantial dreams, and face him now with all the weary pain of the underfed--at once so cynical and so susceptible to one more crumb of hope proffered. The task of breathing life into the Loman family on stage seems like it ought to be so simple--after all, Miller has done all the hard work, hasn't he? The simplicity is doubtless deceptive. But unfairly or not, one tends to feel less than charitable toward a production that does not at least render such a play intact. And while this may be harsh, it is not without sense. It hardly seems worth the effort of producing a play if one cannot give it on stage at least as much vitality as it has on paper.

The semi-professional production of Death that opened Wednesday night at the Tufts Arena Theater is not without its moments of illumination. Unfortunately, the two principals playing Willy and his wife Linda are very weak. And in a play which pivots so strongly on those two figures, the weakness is fatal. Neither Norman Goodman as Willy nor Jan Lewis as Linda seem to have crawled inside their characters to think through the indisputable logic which leads those characters to say one thing rather than another at any point. They seem to focus their eyes always on the wrong thing--which is to say, on something other than what was compelling the characters' attention.

When Willy kills himself at the end of the play, Linda gives out a piercing scream. In that scream there is a misplaced sense of horror--as if the tragedy resides in the fact of Willy's death (a fact we know to be impending from the very start), rather than in the nature of his life, in the horror of a man as he watches the utter wasteland of his life come crashing through his last remaining Maginot line of self-delusion. The crucial point here is that Willy is not just a broken-down salesman--he never was a salesman. For he finds the proposition which his brother Charley puts to him, that "the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell," intolerably painful. But Goodman plays Willy as a man of no more substance than the dreams he spins--as a buffoon, a con-man who really could be happy selling the Brooklyn Bridge if only someone would buy. But there isn't a member of the Loman family who is deceived by this shabby little dog-eared pack of dreams that Willy has been hauling about--and least of all, Willy. And therein lies the bitter legacy of human grandeur--that unlike the less fortunate primates, we get to chronicle our own spreading stench of death.

But the fact that Willy disbelieves his own dreams does not prevent him from suspending that disbelief at the slightest provocation. It is this absurdly myopic vision of ours which keeps us from going quite mad--for how can one believe that Sisyphus would ever again put his shoulder to the rock were the total picture clear to him. No, he puts his shoulder to the rock always in the belief that this time he shall reach the top. And that vision of the top, at a distance from him measurable in finite hours of labor is the only real, compelling vision that he has. Now this is a tricky business. It requires that an actor playing Willy follow headlong each rising line without anticipating the inevitable fall, all the time that he knows he is spiralling deeper and deeper into a hole from which he will not emerge. In short it demands that an actor believe totally in the authenticity of Willy Loman, and it's never clear that Goodman does.

Linda is the force that keeps the Loman family from coming unglued long before it finally does. She is not stupid; she is not un-moved by dreams of better times, nor unaware that they shall remain little more than dreams. But as peacemaker in the family, she cannot afford the emotional flights which characterize the male members of the family. That dynamic works in the play for the same reasons it has worked in generations of families. It seems clear that Miller intended to have her function that way, and it is not at all clear why Lewis plays her as a histrionic cheerleader. She is too high key, too insistent, and her forced optimism lacks all the finesse necessary to make it work.

With the nerve center of the play pithed, evaluating the rest of the production requires a certain amount of mental taxidermy, imagining how all the members would look were they attached to a vital form. At the end of the play, Biff, the son most deeply scarred with Willy's broken dreams and promises, falls upon Willy sobbing, in recognition of the common bond that still exists beneath the spite and anger. It should be a very moving moment, but it doesn't work in this production. And that was not Biff's fault--it was Willy's who, in being little more endearing than a Fuller Brush man, makes Biff's gesture seem strangely out of place. But given this difficulty, the remainder of the cast is good to excellent. William Hutson as Biff is particularly effective in his scenes with his brother Happy. Special mention must be made of Mark Swiney as Happy, the only one in the family who has learned his trade, who picks up the scraps of Willy's dreams and sells them on the small-time circuit for twice the price. It ain't a great life, but he gets by. Swiney catches hold of the character and he never lets go the entire time he is on the stage. He has obviously thought through how Happy would sit in a chair, how he would hold a cigarette or pick his teeth, and so there is an economy and an inherent logic to all his movements.

Also good are Kenneth Levy as Uncle Charley and Robert Dean as his son Bernard, both of whom have learned to accept the pedestrian nature of their lives. The director would have done well to tone down the simpish qualities of Bernard as a child--the play is clear enough on that point without the necessity of aping it. Carla Dragoni is very good as Willy's one-time lover. She is willing to take some chances in bringing the character alive, and the gamble pays off.

The stage of the Arena Theater at Tufts is quite small, which is not a problem for most of the play, but does create some difficulties in the mind-lapse sequences which need to seem unstrapped by time and space. The set is simple and functional, as are the costumes--which is in both a virtue.

One last quibble with the direction concerns the final Requiem scene by Willy's grave. It was staged as a symbolic rite, and I don't think Miller intended it that way. I think he meant for each character to view Willy in death as they had in life--each through his or her particular sense of what is possible and what is not. In this scene, as elsewhere in the play, the intensity does not arise from an inattention to the ordinary details of our lives. It comes because we are forced to witness the mediocrity of our lives, even as we remember with Willy the dreams of better times--dreams so vivid we can almost taste them. And because we shall never cease to hate those things in life which compel a compromise, we shall never learn to make it gracefully, and shall never cease to loathe ourselves for making it at all.