Rebirth of an American Dream

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

DEATH OF A SALESMAN by Arthur Miller

"He's liked, but he's not--well liked."

"When I was 17, I walked into the jungle, and when I was 21 I walked out. And by God I was rich."

"He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

And, above all, this: "So attention must be paid . . . Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person."

To hear those lines spoken from a stage now, 35 years after they were first heard, is to realize how deeply they have insinuated themselves into the collective unconscious of modern America. We quote them without citing their original source, in some cases without knowing what that source is. And, again, not quite consciously, many of us live our lives differently than once we might have--defining success, failure, our relationships with our children, even our notions of what constitutes a worthwhile job in new ways. That is, in part, because more than a generation ago Arthur Miller invented an American dreamer named Willy Loman, put him in a play called Death of a Salesman, and invited us to watch him and his false, almost comic, near-to-tragic dream unravel.

Such was the cautionary power of this work that one's largest fear, approaching the new, palpitatingly anticipated Broadway production of Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman in a role he admitted wanting to play since he began acting, only a decade after Miller finished writing it, was that we might have learned too well the lessons Willy taught. Perhaps familiarity might have rendered him irrelevant, a figure of nostalgic curiosity, conceivably, but of vastly diminished power to engage the emotions.

That fear turns out to be entirely groundless. For Director Michael Rudman's fluid, driving production is not just a revival and a restaging, nor even a reinterpretation of the play, but a virtual reinvention of it. And Hoffman's performance as Willy is nothing short of a revelation. He has stripped away all the doomy portents that have encrusted the character over the years and brought him down to fighting weight, a scrappy, snappy little bantam, whom the audience may, if it wishes, choose to see as a victim, but who almost never sees himself that way. Not long ago, Arthur Miller said that "Willy is foolish and even ridiculous sometimes. He tells the most transparent lies, exaggerates mercilessly, and so on. But I want you to see that the impulses behind him are not foolish at all. He cannot bear reality, and since he can't do much to change it, he keeps changing his ideas of it."

It is this Willy that Hoffman plays with the demonic ferocity that is his glory as an actor. Shifting suddenly from time present to time past and back again, the play moves along a steadily darkening arc; Hoffman bobs and weaves on that line, shadowboxing the gathering shadows, hoping to the end for a T.K.O. over reality. When the inevitable arrives, when he has lost his job, when it is clear that his sons have been ruined by his belief that success is just a matter of concealing the needle of sharp practice in a hand gloved by fraudulent gladness, his suicide is only in part dictated by despair. There is this insurance policy, and if Willy can contrive to make his demise look like an accident, then he will have achieved in death what he never could in life--a legacy for his family and, better still, that edge on the system for which he had always angled. When Hoffman makes his final exit, he actually does a little shimmy and shake, so eager is his salesman for this last but most promising road trip.

Yet exhilarating as this performance is, it does not dominate or distort Miller's vision. In fact, it frees it from the limits imposed by critics of the original production, who tended to see Willy's fate determined almost solely by capitalist economics, and by later commentators who wondered whether the salesman could be regarded as a truly tragic figure, since he was not observed to fall from the great heights demanded of such characters by the laws of Aristotelian aesthetics. From the beginning, Miller told TIME Reporter Elaine Dutka, he had seen the play as two seemingly different entities. One was "a veritable encyclopedia of information about the man," which would permit actors and audiences alike to find their own sense of what moved him. The other was a kind of free-form poem, highly condensed emotionally and verbally, "a concentration through some kind of lens of my whole awareness of life up to that point." But here again, the problem of precise clarification was left up to performers and auditors. "What it 'means,' " said Miller, "depends on where on the face of the earth you are and what year it is."

He speaks from heartening experience. It has been claimed that not a night passes without Salesman being performed somewhere in the world, usually with success, mostly in venues where no one can possibly conceive of what America was like in 1949. For example, Miller's remarks about Willy's combative relationship with reality were contained in his advice to the players he directed last May in China (an experience he has wryly, and wisely, recounted hi Salesman in Beijing, which the Viking Press will publish next month). To them he also insisted "the one red line connecting everyone hi the play was a love for Willy." Even when the family are appalled by his self-delusions, they see "he is forever signaling to a future that he cannot describe and will not live to see, but he is in love with all the same."

Such a man, obviously, has aspects of the universal about him. And so do his family: the patiently loving wife, played with unsentimental fortitude by Kate Reid in a performance in its way as awesome as Hoffman's; the sons who are Willy bifurcated, with Biff (John Malkovich) inheriting the dreaming genes, Happy (Stephen Lang) the gift of delusory gab, but with both lacking their father's annealing fire. Miller has said that at its heart Salesman is "a love story between a man and his son, and in a crazy way between both of them and America." As the wounded party in that triangle, Malkovich gives a subtly textured performance in which anguished puzzlement never gives way to self-pity. In that sense, at least, he remains this Willy's son. But all the actors in this brilliantly chosen cast are exemplary in their resistance to those easy generalizations that are often the curse of plays as ambitious, ambiguous and spacious as this one is.

One of the traditional arguments about Salesman is whether its diction is failed lyricism or failed realism. But it is neither: its first director, Elia Kazan, says it is written "just off the real." Miller's people are first-and second-generation Americans who have yet to achieve a perfect-pitch imitation of standard American brag, bluff and bluster; their language is thus a precise and moving metaphorical expression of the uneasiness with which they live in the American dream they have not quite assimilated. By touching this language with the accents of Brooklyn's old ethnic neighborhoods, this company simultaneously grounds the dialogue in the reality that formed Miller and his play, and grants his rhetoric, at last, the full weight, color and, yes, poetic power one sensed was waiting to be unlocked in it.

In the process the actors have unlocked, as well, the wild humor ("I laughed a lot when I wrote the play") that was also integral to Miller's first imaginings, yet was somehow lost to memory and lost on revivalists, who have mistaken glum sobriety for high seriousness. On the night of Feb. 10, 1949, when Salesman opened on Broadway the first time, Arthur Kennedy, the original Biff, recalls wandering around in a daze between acts, encountering Miller, and asking him how he thought the play was going. "The issue is not in doubt," the playwright firmly replied; and now it seems even the last pockets of resistance must finally yield to his astonishing, youthful 33-year-old's confidence. What has arrived on Broadway is, assuredly, a classic of the modern theater. And one leaves it not with a sense of relief at a cultural duty properly discharged, but in that state of disarray and wonder that occurs when artists actually manage to act on the poet's simple, hard advice and ' 'make it new.'' --By Richard Schickel