Some of our very best actors got their start in comedy — so it’s only natural that sitcom veterans Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf should arrive on Broadway as that most deadly serious couple in American theater, Willy and Linda Loman, the mid-20th-century strivers at the center of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece Death of a Salesman. Despite their comedic roots, both stars have flexed their dramatic chops over the last decade or two. And both put their entire experience to good use in director Joe Mantello’s hauntingly spare new revival.
Lane, whose signature vocal trick in comedies is raising his voice to get laughs, here uses volume to signal the frustration and exasperation of a hard-working man at the end of his tether. He’s the talkative traveling salesman thrown off the rhythm of his regular spiel when reality fall short of his ambition. At the start of the play, he’s shuffling back home after frayed nerves and mental overload force him to cut short a drive to see clients along the Eastern seaboard. There’s a heavy world-weariness to Lane’s bearing that is almost palpable, the mark of a man whose gift for banter and bonhomie is no longer hitting the mark. He’s been demoted from a salary to ever-dwindling commissions, forced to borrow money from his neighbor, Charley (K. Todd Freeman), to pay his life insurance premium. And paying that premium has prompted him to wonder if he might be worth more dead than alive.
Metcalf, a faithful second fiddle in shows like Roseanne, portrays Linda as a helpmate in the truest, most old-fashioned sense. She recognizes her husband’s vulnerability as well as his fundamental decency, but feels constrained by her secondary status in a middle-class, mid-20th-century home. She’s part therapist, part cheerleader, part target for her husband’s dismissiveness, unwilling to challenge her man too directly despite her almost constant worry. Mostly, though, she’s a fierce protector of Willy’s delicate sense of self-esteem — to the point that she’s adopted a daily ritual of removing and returning a rubber pipe that Willy’s placed by the gas line as a possible way to let the family collect on that insurance policy. “How can I insult him that way?” she asks her do-nothing grown sons.
Those sons, on whom Willy has pinned so much hope to make good on the American Dream he’s struggled to secure for himself, have heightened his sense of disappointment. Christopher Abbott initially seems out of his depth as the dissolute eldest son, Biff, the favored child who squandered a football scholarship to a top college and has cycled through a series of low-end jobs out West before returning home as a 34-year-old man-child with no prospects for career or domestic stability. Abbott grows into the role as the show progresses, particularly as Biff works up the gumption to confront his family about the delusions they continue to hold about him, both past and present. As the perpetually overlooked second child, Happy, Ben Ahlers (the clock twink from The Gilded Age) intuitively conveys the bro-ish attitude of a selfish young playboy all too willing to skate through life under the radar while convincing himself that he’s destined for great things one day. He’s a standout in a tricky role, drawing attention to himself (even showing off his buff shirtless torso) only to willingly cede the spotlight when his father or brother seize it.
Abbott and Ahlers are not the only Biff and Happy on stage. Mantello’s most radical departure from previous productions is to introduce younger actors to play the teenage versions of the Loman boys (as well as Charley’s bookish son, Bernard). Miller had included the roles in an early draft of his script — and here they help to heighten the sense of disorientation when Willy lapses into his many hallucinatory flashbacks. We watch as Lane switches between addressing the younger Biff and Happy (Joaquin Consuelos and Jake Termine) and the thirtysomething versions who can’t possibly live up to their idealized predecessors. Consuelos in particular projects the jockish All-American coolness of a young Tom Cruise — making the contrast with Abbott’s beaten-down adult Biff all the more striking. Did he lose that ruddy-cheeked spark, or did Willy only imagine that he had it in the first place?
Mantello’s other major departure from earlier productions is the physical look of the play — a darkened set resembling an abandoned garage, complete with a dirt floor, fluorescent overhead lights, muddied windows, and tall cement columns whose lower sections have many chipped-away ceramic tiles. Chloe Lamford’s design suggests an industrial-American version of Wagner’s Valhalla, the stage for a primal story uncoupled from the particulars of the Lomans’ Brooklyn family home. Aside from a table, some chairs and benches, and an upstage refrigerator, the only tangible hint of domesticity is the period sedan that Willy drives into the playing area at the top of the show. (It’s a 1964 Chevelle Malibu, not the Studebaker described in the script.)
The cavernous Winter Garden Theatre is not the ideal place to stage an intimate family story. So Mantello embraces the mythic. Lighting designer Jack Knowles pierces the vast, shadowy space with carefully placed beams of bluish white light, then casts the flashback sequences in yellowish sepia shades (the effect is further enhanced with an original score by Caroline Shaw that provides a sonic curtain over Willy’s fuzzy memories).
Curiously, though, Rudy Mance’s costumes are mostly modern in appearance — from Biff and Happy’s athleisure-wear to the zipper vest of Willy’s older brother, Ben (Jonathan Cake), who appears in flashbacks as an avatar of the success story that Willy was unable to write for himself or his progeny. Only Metcalf’s Linda wears house dresses and nighties that hearken to an earlier era (while Willy’s choice of suits read as the preferred garb of a past-his-prime traditionalist.)
In this revival, as in Hamlet, time is out of joint. Mantello wants to sink us into Willy’s disorientation, how easily he withdraws from his bleak present circumstances to embrace a fantastical past that he can recast as sunnier and more promising. But the show retains all the period references — the Studebaker, saccharine pills, the cutting-edge technology of a wire-recording machine that Willy’s much-younger boss (John Drea) shows off when Willy pleads for a desk job after three decades on the road. His appeal has come too late, though, and Drea is overly snappish in handling an underperforming employee hired by his late father.
Other members of the supporting cast fare better, particularly the ever-reliable Freeman as the stalwart neighbor and friend who not only slips Willy money but also offers a patient ear for the unloading of his troubles. Freeman nails the genial big-heartedness of a character who could be tempted to gloat; his nerdy son (Michael Benjamin Washington), dismissed by Willy and his sons as a hopeless nerd who’s “not well liked,” has outshone Biff and Happy with a successful career as a lawyer and a settled home life with a wife and two kids. Instead, though, he indulges Willy’s complaints — and only takes umbrage when his neighbor refuses his offer of a job, even when his long-time employer lets him go. (The fact that Freeman is Black adds another, unspoken element to why the ever-proud Willy might be unwilling to accept.)
While Mantello tries to elide some of the dated elements of this drama, he can’t erase them entirely. He also muddles the ending, when Willy gets back into that Chevy and backs it into the darkness for good. Shaw’s eerie, horror-movie underscore goes strangely quiet here. Instead of the “frenzy of sound” that Miller prescribed to indicate the fatal car crash, we get barely a whimper — and then a brief epilogue that, as a result, doesn’t land with the expected devastation.
No matter. This is a solid production of a play that continues to reflect aspects of American life and works its way into our heart and consciousness with an almost gravitational pull. While Linda gets some of the showiest speeches — which Metcalf delivers with attention-demanding skill — Willy remains its absolute center. His plight could be that of any white-collar worker on the verge of obsolescence due to a cheaper Gen Z workforce or, more likely, the advent of AI. And in a career-best performance, Lane shuffle-steps across the stage while his eyes dart around in a state of addled bewilderment. Though he’s unmoored from reality as well as his own life, he manages to close one final deal. And we’ve all willingly signed on the dotted line. ★★★★☆
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Winter Garden Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 55 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through August 9 for $55 to $399
I thought the slow backing out of the car vs. a frenzied car crash was much more effective. Devastating.