On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BROADWAY FLASHBACKS By Stefan Kanfer Saving Private Ryan was a prime Academy Award candidate for Best Picture. The Thin Red Line is generating much discussion. Tom Brokaw's...
...Dressed in spotless white, he incessantly peddles the virtues of self-reliance and ruthlessness ("I went into the jungle at 17.1 came out at 21, and by God I was rich...
...Hap became a womanizer, more interested in making conquests than advancing his career as a low-level sales executive...
...Out of guilt and concern, Biff and Hap treat their deteriorating father to dinner at a fancy restaurant...
...On opening night, February 10,1949, Willy Loman made his entry into the national vocabulary...
...Worse still, he has filled his sons with delusions about their own limited abilities...
...The salesman is the one who got conned...
...Happiness is being alone every now and then, And Happiness is coming home again...
...Living on commissions, no longer able to make his quotas, he has begun to owe more than he earns...
...The three men are on a crash course, and when it comes the showdown is almost unbearably painful...
...Upon his visits home, he and his father locked horns...
...the dedicated pianist, Schroeder (Stanley Wayne Mathis...
...Koch is, properly, a junior version of his father—the glad-hander on a treadmill...
...Happiness is finding a nickel, catching a firefly, setting him free...
...So often has he repeated the lies about his personal magnetism that he has come to believe them...
...Once again, Lucy sets up as a schoolyard psychiatrist, dispensing advice atfive cents apop...
...Willy Loman may indeed be a fake, but of a very different order than Biff can understand...
...Once again, Charlie Brown cannot win a baseball game or pass a test...
...For happiness is anyone and anything at all That's loved by you...
...At the time Arthur Miller, with one eye firmly fixed on the box office receipts, said he had always envisioned Willy as a man of diminutive stature...
...the intellectual thumb sucker, Linus (B.D...
...And in this production, led by the remarkable Dermehy, nearly all the performers are right...
...The rest of the players could scarcely be bettered...
...Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, survived the downsizing of the comic strip pages by using simple drawings, and captions so minimal that Snoopy snores with a single Z. Composer/lyricist Clark Gesner—who was never to equal his first success—found just the right equivalents in words and music...
...His Willy is a massive graying guy with a voice to match, and thus the collapse is all the more dramatic and desolate...
...The city, with its crowds and competition, is no place for him...
...So it seems only fitting that Death of a Salesman, the play that capped the decade, has returned to Broadway...
...Then Biff, whose athletic gifts pointed to a football scholarship, inexplicably withdrew from life...
...Now here they are at the Ambassador Theater, singing their schoolyard hearts out: the tyrannical Lucy (liana Levine...
...Once he boasted that hundreds of colleagues would attend his funeral service...
...Wong...
...Michael Mayer has directed with taste and precision...
...his Charley is perfection...
...Ben is more of a mythic figure than a fleshed-out individual...
...Peanuts has been around almost as long as Death of a Salesman...
...The scene is a small house in postwar Brooklyn, where a 63-year-old traveling salesman has reached the end of his tether...
...The reply is ignored and the salesman arranges a fatal car crash...
...No matter who tells it, his story is permanent...
...Anderson does not suggest the athlete gone to seed...
...And inevitably Charlie Brown once again, loses his favorite toy to the kite-eating tree...
...The lady of easy virtue is responsible for Biff's downfall: He discovered his father cavorting with her in a Boston hotel room, and from that moment on he regarded the family man as a phony whose counsel was to be ignored or despised...
...Wong occasionally succumbs to a case of the eutes...
...He turns inward, remembering the salad days with his wife Linda (Elizabeth Franz) and their two adoring, strapping sons, Biff (Kevin Anderson) and Happy (Ted Koch...
...Michael Philippi's sculptural lighting emphasizes the Lomans' anguish, as does Richard Woodbury's angular, jazzy score, a bold departure from the haunting notes of Alex North's original music...
...I'm worth more dead than alive," he tells Charley...
...Because this truth is too painful to contemplate, Willy's mind slips its moorings...
...It was only a question of time—49 years, to be exact—before the ageless kids of Peanuts came uptown...
...and his unsympathetic boss, Howard (Steve Pickering...
...Tom Brokaw's book, The Best Generation, has occupied first place on the New York Times' Best Sellers list for three months...
...The next morning Linda bitterly kicks her overgrown boys out of the house, but not before the hungover Biff and Willy have a shouting match...
...Today his language seems a trifle stilted (who in Brooklyn ever said "dasf" as in "No one dast blame this man...
...He played the title character as a bluff, booming figure whose powers ebbed before our eyes...
...Miller was lauded as the new hope of Broadway—that is, when he was not being accused of everything from Left-wing attacks on the foundations of capitalism to stealing ideas from Ibsen...
...The comic strip was born in 1950, and its characters subsequently appeared on greetings cards, in TV miniseries, Ford commercials, Thanksgiving Day parades, theme parks, and even in an Off-Broadway show...
...the winsome innocent, Sally (Kristin Chenoweth...
...The neighbor disagrees: "Nobody ain't worth nothing dead, Willy...
...His younger brother was a budding salesman in the path of his old man...
...Good grief...
...Temporary he may be...
...He became a symbol of the failed American dreamer, and lines from the play turned into modern catch phrases: "Attention must be paid," "Liked, but not well liked," "Riding on a smile and a shoeshine...
...In it, Biff finally acquires enough wit to realize that he doesn't have enough brains...
...These changes are all to the good...
...In the production at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, Brian Dennehy now inhabits the role in much the same manner...
...Linda was an affectionate stay-at-home mom, and Willy was the breadwinner with a future as oversized as his suits...
...The statement led me to a firm conclusion: This playwright can often be believed on the stage, but should always be ignored in newspaper interviews...
...Shortly afterward, Willy muses about his insurance policy...
...For despite the salesman's braggadocio about popularity and prowess, Willy is not so much a has-been as a never-was, a very average drummer with no special gifts, no close friends, no real prospects...
...Jerry Mitchell's choreography is childlike without being childish...
...he is caught in his own fantasies of glory —the new edition of Willy Loman...
...The '40s are back, bigtime...
...He belongs out of town and in the open, away from the illusions pushed by the father he now forgives yet must forsake...
...Instead of going to college he became a wanderer and a petty thief, aimlessly knocking around the West...
...this is an expressionistic Salesman, sharp, bold, devoid of sentimentality...
...Set designer Mark Wendland has discarded the usual urban landscape and replaced it with elemental scenery on a revolving stage...
...his dour neighbor, Charley (Howard Witt...
...The articulators of this admirable philosophy are a bright and youthful bunch who can sing, dance and look like kids even though they are all old enough to see R-rated movies...
...a demimondafne (Kate Buddeke...
...Biff was a high school football hero...
...You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown is essentially the Off-Broadway musical of 1967, augmented, updated and given superior production values...
...He bought the American dream wholesale ("A man can end with diamonds here if he's liked") and it killed him...
...Nevertheless, his work retains the ability to evoke sorrow, anger and pity...
...We also see some wracking encounters with Willy's absurdly successful brother, Ben (Allen Hamilton...
...Hap, for his part, struggles vainly to get out...
...Haif a century later, practically all middle-aged actors yearn to play Willy—and many do, in regional productions, on television and, periodically, on Broadway...
...Once again, Snoopy chases rabbits and sings lyrically about the best time of life, suppertime...
...Happiness is having children or grandchildren to take to this quirky and endearing musical...
...Hamilton has the size but lacks the sonority of amythic figure...
...Happiness is morning and evening, daytime and nighttime too...
...Everything seemed so hopeful then...
...But as this most modern revival demonstrates, attention must be paid to Willy Loman...
...still, he gives Biff just the right mix of force and bewilderment...
...His "Happiness" is Schulz' kindergarten dialectic set to rhyme: Happiness is five different crayons, knowing a secret, climbing a tree...
...The '80s, for example, saw Dustin Hoffman lead a major and misbegotten production at the Broadhurst Theater...
...Salesman's individual parts remain plums, ready for the right performer to pluck them...
...Director Robert Falls has obviously chosen to break from tradition...
...Otherwise the sextet performs with admirable restraint—save for the moments when Bart, quite rightly, acts like a canine yearning to be a World War I pilot, and when Chenoweth's energy bursts through the proscenium, making her as irrepressible as she is irresistible...
...David Gallo's sets and Michael Krass' costumes seems to have jumped from the Sunday papers...
...As Linda, Franz progresses cannily from enabler to ennobler, and her cello voice lends extraordinary dignity to the proceedings...
...But there were too many ruts in the road to the top...
...But only five people show up—his immediate family and the folks next door...
...In one of Willy's most moving speeches, he recalls the father who left when he was very young: "I never had a chance to talk to him and I still feel—kind of temporary about myself...
...First, Willy lost the gift of persuasion...
...Almost every night the History Channel runs documentaries about the crucial battles of World War II...
...The stage becomes the inside of Willy's mind, and we see lyric flashbacks with the boys when they were teenagers, polishing the red Chevy and planning golden tomorrows...
...the resourceful beagle, Snoopy (Roger Bart) and, of course, the classic loser, Charlie Brown himself (Anthony Rapp...
...Witt has been around long enough to have played Biff and Willy in out-of-town productions...
...The hosts are soon distracted by a couple of flirtatious women (Stephanie March and Nina Landey), however, and abandon Willy to his whisky...
...As for Linda, she just got older and poorer and sadder...
...The first Willy, of course, was the heavyweight Lee J. Cobb...
...Half a century ago, Death of a Salesman was viewed as a breakthrough work, proof that the subject of tragedy could be a serf as well as aking...
Vol. 82 • March 1999 • No. 3
