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‘Salesman’ Comes Calling, Right on Time
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
the jails are full of fearless characters
THERE is never a wrong time to take a fresh look at a great work of art. But some moments are riper than others for re-encountering plays in particular, which are most fully alive when they are onstage, and then retreat to the bookshelves — or digital form, today — when they are not being performed. The current moment could hardly be more opportune for another wrenching rendezvous with Willy Loman, the American dreamer fighting a losing battle with fortune in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”
Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in the 1949 Tony Award-winning production of "Death of a Salesman."
More than a decade after the last Broadway revival, Philip Seymour Hoffman takes up the burden of Willy’s sample cases and the doubts, fears and dreams spilling out of them, in a new production directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Linda Emond and Andrew Garfield, opening March 15 at the Barrymore Theater.
Nobody doesn’t know “Death of a Salesman,” of course. It may be the first play you read in high school, or even appeared in in high school, as Mr. Hoffman did, playing Willy. (Somehow it’s not hard to picture a teenage Mr. Hoffman bent down by care, schlepping those cases onstage.) Regular revivals on Broadway as well as in regional and amateur theaters have made it one of a small handful of gold-plated stage classics that have practically become a part of the collective psyche.
But the sharp economic downturn that followed the bursting of the housing bubble, and the discovery of the dubious financial practices behind it, casts a revivifying new light on the plight of the Loman family. In both its small details — paying off a mortgage after 25 hard years is a plot point — and its implied questions about the hollowness of some cherished American ideals, the play feels unusually, perhaps unhappily, timely.
In this spirit, over the next few weeks The New York Times is presenting a series of online discussions and interactive forums on the ArtsBeat blog that will explore the play and its contexts — then and now — with American playwrights, artists involved in the coming production, and readers.
In an essay written for The Times on the first anniversary of the play’s 1949 opening, Miller described Willy’s tragedy, in ringing tones, as that of “a man who did believe that he alone was not meeting the qualifications laid down for mankind by those clean-shaven frontiersmen who inhabit the peaks of broadcasting and advertising offices.” Hearing the “thundering command to succeed” he found himself with no recourse but “to stare in the mirror at a failure.”
With employment continuing to lag and millions of homes in foreclosure, there are surely many men and women avoiding the mirror and its accusations, believing, like Willy, that their inability to achieve the golden ideal of financial success is somehow a personal indictment. In the more than half-century since the play opened the compulsion to measure a man’s worth by the size of his paycheck has probably become only more pronounced in American culture.
The ethos of the banker-gods and C.E.O.’s set the overriding cultural tone for much of the last 30 years, as the salaries of leading company executives have skyrocketed, figures like Donald Trump and Warren Buffett have become national luminaries, and the care and tending of the stock market became not just a primary priority of the government but an obsession of the average American too, endlessly exposed to the gyrations of the markets via cable and network news channels.
The economic collapse — the Great Recession, it has come to be called — has ignited a prickly questioning of these priorities. The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought an intensified focus on the growing inequities in the economy and the dubious practices of the bankers so recently seen as worship-worthy titans, if not oracles. I expect there will be particularly hearty chuckles greeting a line I had forgotten from the play. When Willy is boasting to his brother that his sons are “fearless characters,” his neighbor Charley wryly comments, “Willy, the jails are full of fearless characters.”
Willy’s brother Ben then chimes in, with a laugh: “And the stock exchange, friend.”
The Great Depression was the formative event in Miller’s young life. In a 1958 speech, later printed in Harper’s magazine, he called it “the ground upon which I learned to stand.” Born in 1915, he was the son of first-generation immigrants. His father became a successful manufacturer of women’s coats, and during Miller’s early years the family lived in splendor, in a town house in a neighborhood of Harlem populated by prosperous Jewish families. But Miller’s father had invested much of his money in the stock market, and when the crash came in 1929, the family was cast into comparative poverty, moving from their plush town house to a small house in Brooklyn.
The character of Willy was most closely modeled on an uncle, Miller said, but his father’s precipitous fall from affluence to abjection, and his restless attempts over the years to re-establish himself in business, surely find an echo in Willy’s desperate determination to make himself into the success in the eyes of the world that he cannot stop imagining himself to be.
Aside from its implicit critique of the notion of valuing a man’s life by the rung he occupies on the ladder of commerce, other elements in the play resonate freshly today. Among the most famous phrases, recurring in the dialogue almost like an incantation, is Willy’s fervid emphasis on the importance of being “well liked,” once again using a quantitative measure to establish a human being’s inherent value. His son Biff, Willy asserts, will inevitably rise in the world, despite the moral failings they both swat away like pesky gnats, because he is “well liked,” not merely “liked,” as is Charley’s studious son Bernard.
Thanks to the explosion in social media, being “well liked” has become practically a profession in itself. Adults as well as teenagers keep assiduous count of their Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and surely are inwardly if not outwardly measuring their worth by the rise or fall of the number. People are turning themselves into products, both for profit and for pleasure, and the inevitable temptation is to equate the popularity of your brand with your fundamental self-worth.
Many of us are willingly become versions of Willy Loman, forever on the road — that is, online — selling ourselves and advertising our lifestyles: describing the meal we just consumed at a restaurant (with uploaded photograph of course) or the trip we’re planning to take. A social-media gadfly (or, say, me) might suggest that there are vestiges of Willy’s tormenting self-doubt in the need to advertise every moment of our life so assiduously, as if constant Facebook updates could vanquish the inner voice whispering in Willy’s ear that his life is built on sand.
Of course it is hardly necessary to consider the social and economic developments that are mirrored or prefigured in the drama to emerge provoked by a viewing of “Death of a Salesman.” It has become an established classic not just in America but on the world’s stages. (Miller himself directed a production in China in 1983.) It succeeded despite the contemporary complacency of postwar America — when it was attacked from forces on the right as ill-disguised Communist propaganda from a confirmed lefty — just as it will likely succeed in attracting audiences today who can relate to Willy’s struggle to maintain a foothold in the upward-striving American middle class. (Although at more than $100 a ticket, sadly, Broadway has priced itself out of the market of a lot of middle-class Americans.)
The play moves us on any number of levels, perhaps most fundamentally as a mid-century American version of that classic dramatic archetype dating back to the Greeks: the family in mortal conflict with itself. The Loman family’s conspiracy to support Willy in his delusions — at least until Biff decides he has to destroy his father’s illusions to save himself — is drawn from true filial and marital love, and it is in observing how little this love can do to save Willy that the play is most devastating. He is too consumed by the belief that his failure to succeed, and to inculcate success in his sons, has somehow disqualified him for full membership in the human race.
Despite Willy’s delusions and moral evasions, Miller always insisted on the nobility in his struggle. “The play is really about mortality and leaving something behind,” he told The Times during an interview on the occasion of the Chinese production. “Willy Loman is trying to write his name on a cake of ice on a hot July day.” His contradictions and his failings are all human and all common, which is why the hallucinatory last day of his life will always retain the power to command not just our pity but our respect too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/th...alesman&st=cse
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