On Stage

...Not only because it brings Dustin Hoffman back to Broadway, therefore, the current revival of Miller's classic drama at the happily not yet torn down Broadhurst Theater is an important event...

...Director Michael Rudman has staged many scenes well—notably the graveside scene, and those with Willy and Biff, or Willy and his wife Linda (Kate Reid, who manages an impressive presence in a part often decried as devoid of personality...

...Indeed, for the first act Merritt does just short of nothing...

...He is Shelly Levine, and Robert Prosky' s discerning interpretation does more for this oldest member of the crew than Mamet's incomplete script...

...The character of Uncle Ben (Louis Zorich) is as inadequately explained as the "Boston mystery" is disappointing...

...He is brainwashed, but willingly or at least unresistingly so...

...Mamet gives us unmitigated monsters, and would have us believe they exist in a 99:1 ratio...

...The three scenes consist of two people seated between blackouts at one or the other or both of the tables—talking...

...Last year, the play was exported to post-Maoist Beijing, and it is now being seen in various parts of China...

...his sons did not drop out of college for lack of money, and on the very day of his suicide the last payment has been made on the mortgage on his house...

...he wants to believe he still can be useful...

...What Willy sees in him, why he quotes Ben so much, is unclear...

...Nor do I feel obligated to learn the jargon of any profession to understand a play...

...his explosions of fury are empty, never reaching the level of rebellion...

...When the revelation finally comes near the end of the evening, it must be a letdown for all except the most puritanical: Once, several years ago, Biff caught his father in a Boston hotel with a woman...

...At least in American Buffalo his characters talked dirty because that was the only language they needed and knew...

...All doubts disappear, however, as soon as we see him as Loman returning home in the dim evening light, exhausted and staggering under the weight of two heavy suitcases containing his samples...

...Willy Loman's assigned territory is New England, but at the end of an unsuccessful trip—indeed, one he had to interrupt when he noticed his mind wandering and his car wheels skidding—he could be a traveling salesman anywhere...

...Gregory Mosher's direction provides few really captivating moments...

...There is in addition a "Boston mystery," repeatedly alluded to as the key to their troubles...

...There are good reasons for this choice: Besides the dramatic possibilities it offers the performer, it recognizes that present-day theater goers can more easily empathize with a character driven to insanity than one who seems to have been born helplessly inane...

...I don't know what kind of future Loman suggests to today's Chinese, but he certainly cannot be dismissed as part of America's forgotten past...

...The growing and finally crushing mental crisis he suffers seems inevitable in a man convinced that success at work is essential to justifying one's life and is measured by how much money one can go on making...

...Is that why Biff has developed a lasting hatred of Willy and become a drifter...

...Interestingly, Miller reportedly disliked the film version of the play because Fredric March played Loman as "crazy...

...Death of a Salesman is a tragedy without a hero whose success—as the playwright has always been aware—nevertheless depends on the lead actor...

...Themost damaging, in my view, is Miller's emphasis on a kind of Victorianism that was probably outdated already in 1949...

...Ben Edwards' three-level scenery is clumsily "constructivist...

...Add to this his high-pitched, often rasping voice plus a tendency toward disjointed movements, and we may be forgiven for wondering whether Hoffman has been miscast...

...This is something he uses systematically in his work for no apparent reason other than to provoke giggling and bursts of hysterical laughter, most often from women...

...Or while arguing madly with Ben, Willy may be talking to himself, trying to justify death as the only escape from his chosen yet failed way of life...

...There may be a clue in the fact that he gives the woman from Boston a pair of stockings, but whether one does or doesn't guess, or guesses wrong, need not affect one's appreciation of the play...

...For Biff and his brother Happy (Stephen Lang), Uncle Ben provides a whiff of excitement, possibly an antidote to the boredom their father exhales...

...Although I cannot speak from personal experience, I have of course heard of crooked land dealings involving Florida, the location of two fictional "developments" handled by Mamet's men...

...Walsh...

...Physically, Dustin Hoffman is the opposite of Lee J. Cobb, who first created the role...

...He is not thinking of his rights or asking for charity...

...A good man who possibly would do differently if he were the boss, Loman is deeply hurt, but he probably understands that a businessman will not keep an unproductive employee...

...When his neighbor and only real friend, Charley (beautifully played by David Huddleston), offers him a job out of the pure kindness of his heart, Loman rejects it...

...He argues with his boss not because he wants to fight...

...Neither does the current production at the Broadhurst Theater...

...When Claude Dauphin—who knew the American theater and American life first-hand—played the part in an industrial suburb north of Paris where a repertory theater had just opened up, his Loman won immediate acceptance...

...Unfortunately, Miller seems disposed to keep us guessing as to Uncle Ben's significance, and the confusion adds nothing to the play...

...This time, with the gutter lingo so ingrained in his salesmen, one cannot envision them being capable of even talking to their middle-class customers...

...We have read in the Playbill that the three scenes take place "in a Chinese restaruant...

...Admittedly, such caricatures can be commercially rewarding...

...Perhaps for the father, too, Ben sparks a hidden desire for excitement...

...Still, Willy Loman is not a victim of society—if that is what the author meant to imply, despite the fact that it isn't really his conclusion in the moving scene at the salesman's graveside...

...All we see is a strange dark gate in the background that I confess not have recognized as Chinese...

...In the foreground— side by side, facing the public—there are two ugly tables with benches that could belong to any small, cheap bistro...

...Then there is Mamet's gratuitous, albeit well-advertised, scatological language...

...the bedrooms are on two levels and the kitchen wall rotates, replacing a refrigerator with an office water cooler or restaurant jukebox...

...What he succumbs to is professional failure caused by age and exhaustion...

...In the nascent McCarthy era after 1949, some critics found "revolutionary," even "party line," politics in the scene where Loman is fired by the boss whose father he had worked for, and who the salesman had once held on his knees...

...Dustin Hoffman is the universal worker, too...

...Loman has managed, in his own eyes, to maintain a satisfactory standard of living...

...Deep down, Loman may regret that the only adventure in his life has been his woman in Boston (Kathy Rossetter is miscast and misdirected in the role), who offers little compensation for the loss of Biff s love...

...Of the four salesmen and the no less crooked office manager, only one man has been provided with a few mixed emotions, making him a complicated, tormented and plausible character...

...It seems clear that he has interpreted Willy Loman as being close to a clinically defined madman...

...Nonetheless, Glengarry Glen Ross, which was hailed at its premiere in London as the best play of the season before it was embraced by the Broadway critics, is neither a valid social drama nor an intelligent satirical comedy—if only because its characters are exaggerated stereotypes...

...Ben deals in diamonds, but he is not Willy's brand of salesman...

...Loman's older brother is a fighter quite adept at handling the sword-cane he carries, an adventurer who periodically arrives from some African jungleand talks constantly about his travels...

...The still loving son had come to ask his father's help with a problem at college...

...The restaurant also serves as the lobby of the Boston hotel where horribly amplified, nerve shattering laughter announces the woman in black negligee who will surprise Biff...

...Like Miller's one in 1949, they have just won their author the Pulitzer Prize for Drama...

...In David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross at the John Golden Theater there are four salesmen, all operating out of a Chicago real estate office...

...In contrast to Mamet's technicalities, in Death of a Salesman Miller does not even specify what Loman is selling...

...Hoffman's unexpectedly genuine performance captures this very well...

...Yet in the salesman's fascination with and terror of the only definitions of success and failure he can imagine, and in the despair of his conflict with his son Biff (John Malkovich) brought about by those weaknesses, Willy Loman is also typically American...

...Although his job was unfamiliar in Aubervilliers, everyone in the house identified with him...

...To the working-class audience Loman was not an exotic character from across the ocean...

...Glengarry Glen Ross is not helped by its production...

...More to the point, a writer with something to say about swindlers—who no doubt exist among lawyers, architects, politicians, and funeral directors as well as salesmen—must create believable characters...

...On Stage CORRUPTED SALESMEN BY LEO SAUVAGE Since Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman opened in 1949 at the now demolished Morosco Theater, Willy Lo-man has become the most discussed, performed and widely recognized character of contemporary international theater...

...While Death of a Salesman is one of the most important plays of the modern theater, itisnotwithoutflaws...

...Willy and Biff's conflict is not due merely to the father's clinging to his ideal of being a popular salesman and the son's dreaming of becoming anything else but...

...The other salesmen and office manager are well-played by Joe Mantegna, Mike Nuss-baum, James Tolkan and J.T...

...But unlike the playwright, who once sold real estate himself and does not hesitate to generalize, I am not fascinated by the workings of this part of the economy...

...But Rudman appears utterly lost in Edwards' multilevel set, and he does not help us to differentiate the ordinary flashbacks from the hallucinations...

...I'm aware, too, that the reputation of many real estate salesmen is not much above that of used-car pushers...

...And Michael Merritt's set is much worse than the unhelpful but at least ambitious scenery of Death of a Salesman...

...He hardly fits our inveterate image of an average, or even below-average, hardworking, unintellectual, conformist American...