Death of a Salesman has been owned by White actors–and by White audiences.
André de Shields
The Loman house in this astonishing new production of Death of a Salesman consists of an explosion of isolated windows, doors, and furniture suspended by wires. I’m reminded of Arthur Miller’s original title for the play, The Inside of His Head, as these precarious furnishings, which descend and rise throughout the play, reflect the fractures within Willy’s mind as well as the tenuous state of the Loman family.
And these Lomans, reconceived as an African American family, exemplify anew how tenuous is the family’s grip on the American dream. Other Black actors may have played Willy Loman (never before on Broadway); this, however, is not color-blind casting, but rather color-conscious casting. The magnificent Wendell Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke (as well as André de Shields as Willy’s brother Ben, Khris Davis and McKinley Belcher III as his sons Biff and Happy) bring their full selves to this production.
Wendell Pierce’s performance is heartbreaking. His intense and compelling Willy Loman is no pathetic victim but shows himself to be a grandly tragic figure. Nor is this Linda a victim of Willy’s rage. In a riveting performance, Sharon D. Clarke manifests the fierce love of a Black woman holding her family together. In an interview with The Washington Post, Pierce describes Clarke’s conception of Linda by paraphrasing the poet Nikki Giovanni:
I hope that when I grow up no White person ever writes about my poverty, not seeing that all along, we were wealthy in love.
Marianne Elliott’s previous work includes reconceiving the vacillating bachelor of Sondheim’s Company as a woman conscious of her biological clock in a production that arguably improved on the original. Here, she and co-director Miranda Cromwell have reimagined another classic in a way that expands our understanding of the play. The production is so thrillingly transformative, in fact, I found myself rethinking everything I thought I knew about the play.
Miller considered the work an indictment of American capitalism. Barely a word is changed to make it a similarly scathing indictment of American racism.
Willy’s Act II encounter with his arrogant young boss Howard will always feel degrading, but the indignity takes a deeper turn in this production when Howard offhandedly calls him “Boy” (one of the very few script changes). The moment becomes even more chilling with a new stage direction.
At the end of Act I, Willy had given Biff advice before his interview with a former employer: “And if anything falls off the desk while you’re talking to him—like a package or something—don’t you pick it up. They have office boys for that.”
It seems an insignificant line in the original script, but in this version it comes back to haunt him. As Willy begs his boss for a new job in New York, Howard drops his cigarette lighter. Both men pause and look at each other before Willy slowly stoops to pick it up and light Howard’s cigarette. (Miller’s stage direction says merely “[Howard] looks for his lighter. Willy has picked it up and gives it to him.”)
The action is devastating, and the reaction of the New York audience, many of them Black, made it even more so. I heard several voices moan as they recognized the humiliation Willy was about to accept. I inwardly shouted “No!” but my response was much the way I want to shout, say, at Romeo before he drinks the poison. These moans were something different, coming as they did from people who had themselves lived Willy’s experience.
I will sometimes complain about audiences that are too loud, audiences that intrude on my own enjoyment of a play. But this was different. The audience is always a participant in a live performance, even if the participation is as subtle as breathing together during an intense scene. The very vocal participation of the audience throughout this production, most memorably in this moment, reminded me that theater does not belong—should not belong—to privileged White people with our own conventions about how to experience a play.
I want to see a play, I want to hear the play.
No other conventions.
No tribe.