American Tragedy

By Richard Zoglin

LINDA LOMAN: Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

Death of A Salesman got plenty of attention right from the start. When it opened on Broadway in February 1949, the advance buzz was intense, the critics mostly raved (though TIME's Louis Kronenberger complained about its "inadequate artistry" and "sometimes stolid prose"), and the play went on to win both a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It catapulted Arthur Miller to the top rank of American playwrights and has made perhaps a firmer dent in our consciousness than any other drama written for the American stage. So when the play celebrates its 50th anniversary this week with a new Broadway production, it's not just an occasion for theatrical nostalgia but time for a question: Why does this depressing, sometimes overwritten, painfully familiar play still move us in almost every incarnation?

WILLY: He's liked, but he's not--well liked.

The chief reason, of course, is Willy Loman, that all-American victim of his own skewed recipe for success. What's amazing is how flexible and eternally renewable the role has proved to be. Lee J. Cobb created the 63-year-old Willy when he was just in his 30s. Miller hated Fredric March's interpretation in the 1951 movie (he turned Willy into "a psycho," Miller felt), yet March gave the character both a tragic grandeur and a Rotarian recognizability that are unforgettable. There have been black Willy Lomans and Chinese Willy Lomans; big, bearish Willys like George C. Scott and feisty, bantamweight Willys like Dustin Hoffman. Brian Dennehy, in the new production from Chicago's Goodman Theatre that opens (with some minor cast changes) on Broadway this week, is a solid entrant in the big-Willy tradition. He's a charismatic man who, it's easy to imagine, might actually have been liked, even well liked, in his prime. Yet his lumbering frame seems constantly ready to tip over, a giant reduced to childlike confusion.

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

Miller was a social realist, yet it's easy to forget that Death of a Salesman was also an experimental work, with its fluid leaps in time as Willy drifts into memories of his sons as teenagers and of his idolized brother Ben. Director Robert Falls' expressionistic new version--the traditional house set replaced by props and rooms that rotate around Willy on a turntable--puts the focus on Willy's interior life. While not quite the revisionist breakthrough some have hailed it (a 1996 production at London's National Theatre, the stage dominated by a broken tree, departed similarly from naturalistic convention), it reminds us of how influential the play has been stylistically. Seemingly every third play that appears these days, from Golden Child to Side Man, features some kind of time-traveling device, mixing past and present, fantasy and reality--thanks, at least in part, to Death of a Salesman.

WILLY: The Supreme Court! And he didn't even mention it! CHARLEY: He don't have to--he's gonna do it.

Critics have carped about the play's sometimes pretentious language ("Nobody dast blame this man..."). But at its best Miller's dialogue was unmatched for its plainspoken eloquence and economy. Willy, the blusterer with big dreams for his sons, meets Bernard, the nerdy next-door neighbor, now grown up and about to argue a case before the Supreme Court--but possessing too much compassion for Willy to brag about it. Miller captured the essence of Willy's self-delusion and failure in a brief exchange charged with emotion, wit and character insight. Call that poetry.

CHARLEY: A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

The famous eulogy that closes the play is perhaps its cruelest joke. Despite Charley's attempt to ennoble him, Willy's downfall is unrelievedly bleak. (Hardly anyone even shows up at his funeral!) "My God, it's so sad," director Elia Kazan exclaimed to Miller after reading the play for the first time. "It's supposed to be sad," Miller replied. That it continues to fascinate us is testimony to Miller's ability to pack so much--heartbreaking family drama, an Ibsenian tragedy of illusions shattered, an indictment of American capitalism--into one beaten-down figure with a sample case. After 50 years it still makes the sale.