A Bold New DEATH OF A SALESMAN Filled With Talent — Review

At the center of director Joe Mantello’s crisply staged yet emotionally distancing revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, one particular scene stands out. It is a scene that might not typically be considered the play’s most memorable—or at least, would not commonly feel like its narrative peak. 

Titular salesman Willy Loman, a mammoth role here tackled by three-time Tony Award winner Nathan Lane, pays a visit to his obnoxiously youthful boss Howard Wagner. Howard inherited the company from his father, Frank, who made Willy certain promises prior to his death. Now 63-years old, deep in debt and exhausted by life on the road, Willy asks—or, eventually, begs—young Howard for a position in the company’s New York office. A desk job. (The American dream, right?)

As played by a perfectly icy John Drea, Howard is an unfeeling man. He is not cruel, exactly. But certainly Howard is more engaged with his fancy new wire-recording contraption than the desperate Willy. Designer Rudy Mance costumes Drea in a suspiciously Patagonia-adjacent vest, starkly contrasting with Lane’s overworn beige suit—an outfit almost as wearily ragged as the man. Drea is not tall, but standing over the defeated Lane, his dominance is without question. Howard is the future: impersonal, driven by innovation, uninterested in history. Sitting opposite, Willy looks small and irrelevant, like a visitor from another time. 

In other words, Willy looks like he just stumbled in from a little play called Death of a Salesman. And that feeling of temporal displacement is present elsewhere in this spare, abstract mounting by Mantello and a distinguished creative team. Chloe Lamford’s vaguely dystopian set, somewhere between a decaying ‘40s garage and a modern crumbling warehouse, feels both contemporary and ancient. Mance’s other costumes have a similarly displaced quality—Linda Loman’s bathrobe wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban household of today. 

I locked in on Salesman during this scene, stirred up by that feeling of then-and-now colliding in an uncertain and purgatorial theatrical space. But for too much of this spare staging on a grand scale, now open at Broadway’s none-too-intimate Winter Garden Theatre, the same clarity of purpose was not present. Most of Mantello’s gorgeous staging is more impressive than moving, a thing to be admired more than fully engaged with.

Does the fault lie in the play? Hardly. While pockets of Miller’s language do resist efforts to pull this story out of time, the form of Salesman is near-experimental in its structural boldness. Willy’s tragic descent into depression and (maybe) senility is rendered as an unsettling waking nightmare, with figures from his past slipping in and out unsettlingly, like haunting specters pushing him towards doom. Reality is a loose thing in this text, and Mantello embraces that boldness. Voices from past and present meld together confusingly in Sasha Milavic Davies’s destabilizing movement work and Mikaal Sulaiman’s eerie sound design. 

Not everything about Salesman blends perfectly with today. The play’s bucketloads of dramatic irony can feel, in certain moments, just a little suffocating. Perhaps this is not a critique of the play so much as an unavoidable reality of our times: that capitalism and the “American Dream” are cruel, destructive lies is, at this point, a truism. Few writers have deconstructed the American fiction as devastatingly as Miller, but one still inevitably grows fatigued as Willy’s decent unfolds.

I think that Mantello’s goal, in this stripped-down Salesman, is to offset that familiarity by honing in on a certain emotional immediacy. Mantello is looking to make the story feel alive, not a museum piece but present and urgently felt. In this way, Mantello’s vision feels reminiscent of Sam Gold’s genius 2017 revival of Tennesse Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, which pulled away all the ornamentation and got down to the heart of the thing. 

But Mantello is fundamentally a showman, in a way that Gold is not. He can’t fully commit to his own concept, instead allowing a number of grand gestures to seep in. The most fatal is Mantello’s decision to cast the younger versions of Willy’s sons, Biff and Happy, with a separate set of baby-faced performers. As Willy unfolds the exaggerated fantasies of his children’s absurdly hopeful youthful days, these actors (Joaquin Consuelos and Jake Termine, performing the task assigned) leap and bound on-and-off like youthful cubs. Lighting designer Jack Knowles floods the stage with bright sepia tones for these fanciful flashbacks. It's a concept that feels like a concept, constantly yanking this production out of its supposed commitment to simplicity. 

No similar fault can be found in the leading performers, who are superb. Ben Ahlers is a perfect Happy, foolish, flawed but essentially kind; Christopher Abbott commits fully to Biff’s profound disillusionment in both his father and, most tragically, himself in a sincere and heartbreaking performance. 

While Metcalf and Lane cannot fully shake certain familiar mannerisms, both ultimately find an unshowy ordinariness that could, in another production, truly overwhelm. Lane plays Willy’s acceptance of his fate with an unnatural, devastating smallness: in Metcalf’s hands, Linda’s final lines are almost tossed off, as she scarcely herself even has energy left to care.

And yet, I was ultimately unmoved. Why? In sitting uncertainly between total adornment and its weighted ideas of temporal displacement, the production had never quite gotten me there. This Salesman tries to be a few too many things, and.  the intended emotional clarity proves just out of its reach.

Death of a Salesman is now in performance at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.