Review: DEATH OF A SALESMAN at A Noise Within

Long live that glittering sham commonly known as the American Dream! Eternal health and prosperity, too, for Arthur Miller who spent the better part of his career vivisecting that dream with such immortal and cruel humanity! And a hearty round of applause to Pasadena’s A Noise Within which can take a theatrical Everest like Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN and show Los Angeles stage audiences exactly how it should be scaled.

First produced on Broadway in 1949 and with a sixth revival on the brink of opening, SALESMAN, (unlike its delusional protagonist Willy Loman), doesn’t really get old. The play remains a snapshot of post-war American optimism and of an ordinary man brought crashing down to earth for having what Willy’s even more failed son calls “the wrong dream.” In offering up this tale at ANW, director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott delivers a production that pulses with quiet power and a moody score. An excellent cast renders Miller’s band of climbers, dreamers and ghosts with skill and sensitivity. As Willy and Linda Loman, longtime company members Geoff Elliott and Deborah Strang deliver the kind of work that – though we have long since come to expect it of this company and these actors – is no less affecting or remarkable.

Willy Loman, with his titanic ambitions for himself and his family, is not necessarily a physically large man (though “big” presences have certainly registered). Elliott, who has spent decades shape-shifting into classic and contemporary theater’s heroes, disappears into Willy’s unremarkable-ness.  Bespectacled and slightly grizzled, he’s a broken schlub somewhere north of 65 with an unremarkable blue suit and a thick New Jersey accent.  This Willy may be appropriately worshipped by his sons Biff (David Kepner) and Happy (Ian Littleworth) when the kids are teen-agers, but the present day “low man” is dottering, and dismissed, a man to whom attention may not be paid despite his wife's insistence. Which is, of course, what also makes him human.

The Loman house, as rendered by scenic designer Frederica Nascimento, is an open space with a couple of mean pieces of furniture, a table and the bunk beds that the two adult Loma sons currently occupy. We see the refrigerator that keeps breaking, but not the fateful car that takes Willy on the road or the backyard with the hard ground that will take no seeds. A row of windowed brownstone walls from adjoining buildings makes up the backdrop. At the play’s climax, they buckle as if tilted by an earthquake, as the walls seem to be literally collapsing around this salesman.

As familiar and inevitable as any well-known American tragedy, DEATH OF A SALESMAN establishes the problem of the present situation, looks backwards to a kinder past and propels us forward with the scraps of hope that this time things may turn out differently – for Biff, for Happy, maybe even for Linda. The play opens with Willy arriving home and dropping his bags, exhausted and beaten down after his latest trip. Linda, his always-loving partner and keeper of the household, encourages him to get off the road and all but retire from the job that no longer pays his bills anyway. The return of Biff, the former golden boy son with whom Willy is always at odds, provides a glimmer of promise of better times ahead for the entire family if Biff can tap a connection to a sporting goods dealer and finally “make good.”

Willy looks to his past, to his brother Ben (David Nevell) who struck it rich after he discovered a diamond mine in Africa. “How did you do it?” he is continually asking Ben’s ghost in reverie. “What’s the secret?”  And when he’s not interacting – often clashing – with Linda or Biff, Willy has run-ins with his neighbor and friend Charley (Bert Emmett) or Charley’s son, Bernard (Kasey Mahaffy), who succeeded where Biff failed.  

Knowing this play as so many theatergoers will, we as an audience are kept alive by the idea that if but one thing had broken differently in Willy’s past or present, things might have turned out differently. And, indeed, there is an aura of optimism (and testosterone!) in the brotherly conversations between Littleton’s Happy and Kepner’s not yet dispirited Biff. In flashbacks, Willy pumps up his adoring sons, overlooking Biff’s casual thefts (“coach’ll probably congratulate you on your imitative!”) and dismissing Bernard’s warning that Biff is on the verge of flunking math (“Don’t be a pest! What an anemic!”).

The play chronicles Willy Loman’s doomed last stand, and Elliott’s work highlights the salesman’s flaws as sharply as his virtues. The more we witness Willy’s stubbornness get him in trouble with employers, friends and family alike, the greater the tragic stakes become. Elliott knows how to make a character “well-liked,” but his rendering of Willy doesn’t hide the warts. The man may dream big, but the obtuseness and that "joy-sie" accent tell another story: we get why lovers and bosses alike laugh at this man, or – even worse – pity him.

Offering counterpoints are Kepner’s Biff, as self-aware as his father is deluded, and Emmet’s Charley whose ribbing and take-no-BS encounters with Willy are among the production’s fuinest. Mahaffy – so magnetic in recent ANW productions of ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS and A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE – shines equally brightly in his scenes as a quiet character, Bernard.

Insharp contrast, Deborah Strang’s work as Linda Loman invites the opposite of pity. Whether challenging her worthless sons, trying desperately to circumvent her husband’s fate or delivering the final, heartrending line “We’re free,” Strang is a Loman to be reckoned with. She is another ace in a production stacked with them.

DEATH OF A SALESMAN continues through  April 19 at 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena.

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