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. 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. 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.ĭennehy, at this point a huge, rolling bear of a man, creates a Willy with the grace and delicacy of a miniaturist. No role, obviously, is ever the private property of any one actor, and that’s the way it should be. 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. 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. 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. 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. At the O’Neill Theatre, 230 West 49th St., NYC.
Starring Brian Dennehy, Elizabeth Franz and Kevin Anderson.
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