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Dennehy puts Irish in Willy Loman

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Joseph Hurley

DEATH OF A SALESMAN, by Arthur Miller. Starring Brian Dennehy, Elizabeth Franz and Kevin Anderson. Directed by Robert Falls. At the O’Neill Theatre, 230 West 49th St., NYC. Open-ended run.

Willy Loman is Irish again. Arthur Miller’s enduring drama "Death of a Salesman," for half a century one of the world’s most frequently produced plays, has always had a distinct and nearly unique ability to take on the ethnicity of the actor playing the title role.

The first Willy, Lee J. Cobb, was Jewish, and the Brooklyn-based Loman family was rather wisely assumed to be Jewish, since the playwright was a Jew who had lived much of his life in the Borough of Churches, and was thought, with some basis in fact, to have based his tragic hero on one or more members of his own family.

Yet when the late Thomas Mitchell played Willy, the family seemed achingly Irish, a fact that can easily be attested to by the recording the actor, standing in for Cobb, made for Decca Records, with the rest of the original Broadway cast in place.

Now, 50 years after the original opening night at the now-gone Morosco Theatre in February 1949, another Irish-American star, the massive and powerful Brian Dennehy, is playing the role in a dazzling new production transferred from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

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No role, obviously, is ever the private property of any one actor, and that’s the way it should be. Still, it would be difficult to imagine anyone bettering Dennehy, who brings astonishing depth and subtlety to a complicated part that, over the course of five decades in which many of the play’s lines have entered the American language, could easily have slipped into the muddy waters of cliched dramaturgy.

Dennehy, at this point a huge, rolling bear of a man, creates a Willy with the grace and delicacy of a miniaturist. He is matched, beat for beat, by Elizabeth Franz’s patient, clear-eyed wife, Linda, and by the beautifully calibrated work of Kevin Anderson as Biff, the favored son who knows his father’s flaw and who appears destined to follow Willy’s path into terminal mediocrity.

It has been written that "Death of a Salesman" contains two tragic and doomed love stories, namely Linda’s love for her husband, and Willy’s shattered love for Biff, and the assertion has never seemed to have a firmer basis in fact than in the case of the new production, directed with stunning depth of feeling by Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman, where "Salesman" opened the 1998-1999 season.

So strange is the onstage chemistry between all three stars, particularly between Anderson and Dennehy, that the audience’s awareness that these are, after all, actors hired to rehearse and perform a play virtually disappears about 20 minutes into the performance, leaving Willy, Linda and Biff navigating the shadows of designer Michael Philippi’s subtle lighting plot much as they must have moved through Arthur Miller’s mind in 1948 when he built himself a tiny cell-like cabin on a hill behind his new house in Roxbury, Conn., and set about to write a play he considered calling "The Inside of His Head," but which gained immortality as "Death of a Salesman."

Like Miller himself, "Death of a Salesman" has had more than its share of rabid detractors, including the late critic and novelist Mary McCarthy, who considered Willy Loman too insignificant and far too ordinary to qualify as a tragic hero, relegating the play itself to some literary shelf well below the elevated one for which the playwright, never one to cloak his goals in trivial modesty, was clearly aiming.

Seeing Dennehy’s imposing, towering recreation of Willy Loman, it is difficult not to conjure up images of King Lear and Titus Andronicus and other Shakespearean heroes brought low by deluded self-deception and by misperception of the world surrounding them.

The production’s program locates the time of Miller’s play as "the late 1940s," in other words, the precise era in which it was written and first produced. The setting is specified as "Willy Loman’s house and yard, and various places in New York and Boston."

The omitted location, namely the recesses of Willy’s mind, is endlessly present in the play, and perhaps never before as pervasively, due to the almost indescribable impact of Dennehy’s performance. The salesman’s acute awareness of his disintegrating condition is obvious almost from the moment we first see him, standing in the doorway of that Brooklyn dwelling, his massive shoulders slumped, and not merely from the burden of the sample cases he carries.

It would seem difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss "Death of a Salesman," as delivered by Dennehy, Franz, Anderson and, in fact, all of director Falls’s actors, as the story of the crumbling of an inconsequential individual.

It might have seemed, in advance of this new staging’s arrival, that Miller’s play, with its references to Studebakers and wire recording devices, and the old-fashioned football uniform worn by Biff in one of the tale’s memory sequences, might have begun to take on some of the coloration of a period piece. Nothing of the sort happens.

In fact, Falls’s production, moving fluidly and almost cinematically through the downward spiral of Miller’s story, making maximum use of the turntables built into Mark Wendland’s daring scenic conception, should, if anything, serve to reinforce the elevated position "Death of a Salesman" has earned.

The play seems stronger, better, richer and even subtler this time around, the last attribute being perhaps particularly surprising, considering the fact that subtlety hasn’t always been thought of as one of Arthur Miller’s most dominant characteristics.

If the new production of "Death of a Salesman" has somehow managed to make the play seem finer and more universal than ever before, much credit accrues, of course, to the director and his cast, but it must be noted that plays packing this powerful a punch just don’t seem to be coming along in today’s theater, sadly enough.

Based to a degree on a salesman uncle of Miller’s, a depressed, broken man who committed suicide, Willy Loman may be lacking in the rank, stature and nobility conventionally associated with classical tragedy, but he more than makes up for it in terms of recognizable humanity and transparent universality, qualities that combine to form the play’s strongest purchase on immortality, even greatness.

The members of Falls’s cast serve the play brilliantly, with particular praise going to Howard Witt, who, as the compassionate neighbor, "Uncle" Charley, brings insight and freshness to the arguably overwritten funeral scene that ends the play. Charley, like Linda, must speak some of Miller’s riper lines, lines that have become common coin of the American language, not to mention the stuff of comedic monologues over the half century since the play was new. It is to the actors’ credit, and to the playwright’s mastery of his craft, that familiar lines like "Attention must be paid" and "He’s liked, but he’s not well-liked" stay where they belong, part of the text, instead of leaping out into the audience’s collective face.

Also worthy of note are Ted Koch’s portrait of Happy, Willy’s ignored "other" son, whose callous denial of his father draws nightly gasps of shock at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, and Richard Thompson’s work as Charley’s nerdy, overachieving, but loyal son, Bernard.

With a brilliant cast maneuvering its tricky path around the potholes and potential pitfalls of Arthur Miller’s modern classic, "Death of a Salesman" stands gleamingly revealed as what it has always been, one of the very finest plays ever written by an American dramatist.

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