Death Of A Salesman
Lyric Stage Company
March 15, 2014, ends March 16
Running time 2 hours 45 minutes with one 15 minute intermission
Director Spiro Veloudos
Janie E. Howland - Scenic Design; Gail Astrid Buckley - Costume Design; Karen Perlow - Lighting Design; Dewey Dellay - Original Music
You have to be brave and bold to mount a production of this play, thought to be one of the best of the 20th century. It would be easy to descend into sentimentality or veer into a political statement about the cold-hearted nature of the American enterprise system.
Director Spiro Velouldos does neither, thanks to a superb cast and careful adherence to playwright Henry Miller’s two pages that specify precisely what the play’s set should look like… a worn-down apartment in Brooklyn in 1949 in which much of the furniture and appliances are already old.
The Lyric Stage Company nails the set right down to the junky off-white Hastings refrigerator, shabby linoleum on the kitchen floor, and two other rooms in the apartment. It feels small and cramped, much like the lives of the Loman family.
The cast does the rest. It doesn't take long to realize that Willy Loman has transformed the American dream into an ongoing American nightmare. While it's painful to watch him descend into delusion and play out his final get rich scheme, it's even more disturbing to watch how Willy's dreams have stunted the lives of his wife Linda (Paula Plum) and his two sons Biff and Happy, solidly acted by Kelby T. Akin and Joseph Marrella.
Willy has never been able to connect the dots between his lofty dreams and what it takes to achieve them. He never really understood that a smile and a shoeshine were not enough to forge a successful career as a salesman. You had to make the numbers.
The beauty of Henry Miller's play is how artfully, through dialogue, flashbacks, and voices imagined by Willy, that he leads us to understand how Willy’s dreams for his sons have unwittingly stunted them as young men yet kept alive his wife's love for him. She knows he’s a good man, does not know of his infidelties, a secret that has consequences.
Willy’s accounts of his prodigious days as a salesman are countered by small bits of reality that seep through every scene Henry Miller has written. It’s not pretty. Willy has been a mediocre salesman at best. Humans are dreamers by nature. Most of us know the difference between our dreams and our realities. Many of us have had moments like Willy in which we realize our lives and our dreams for our lives don’t match perfectly. We adjust.
The Willys of the world don’t adjust. They self -destruct. Watching Willy deconstruct is painful enough. Watching his sons run the same pattern is unbearably sad.
Ken Baltin carries the play on his shoulders from the first moment he shuffles into his dingy apartment after an awful trip on the road. His mixture of bravado, bonhomie and self-importance, is clearly tinged with desperation and the ominous realization that he has failed as a father, husband, and, worst of all for him, as a salesman. Willy has died on his feet long before he dies at the play’s dark final scenes.For my money, Paula Plum is the Meryl Streep of Boston theater. I've never seen her been anything less than exceptional. Her portrayal of Linda Loman is extraordinarily shaded. Willy doesn’t give her the chance to interrupt him when he’s talking which is most of the time but Linda is Willy's chief cheerleader. She’s also firm and perceptive. Linda tries to broker peace between her sons and their father, seeing what she believes to be their lack of understanding of the man at best and their contempt for him at worst. “Attention must be paid!” she demands of her sons when Willy begins his final slide. And is willing to banish them from her home when they don’t.
Every little thing about this play works. The team of Janie E. Howland - Scenic Design; Gail Astrid Buckley - Costume Design; Karen Perlow - Lighting Design; Dewey Dellay - Original Music gives the play an authentic period feel.
The entire cast, especially Kelby T. Akin and Joseph Marrella as Loman's sons, Charley (Larry Coen) and Willy's brother Ben (Will McGarrahan) make the mark. Credit Veloudos with casting young African-American Omar Robinson as Howard Wagner, the son of Willie’s former boss who now runs the sales business. There was one black face in a full house audience of 240 tonight. Boston needs to expand its audience in terms of race and age. Unusual casting like this can help turn that around.
Photos courtesy of Lyric Stage Company website
Appendix:
The cast:
Ken Baltin -Willy Loman
Paula Plum - Linda Loman
Joseph Marrella - Happy Loman
Kelby T. Akin- Biff Loman
Victor L. Shopov - Bernard
Eve Passeltiner - The Woman
Larry Coen - Charley
Will McGahhahan - Uncle Ben
Omar Robinson - Harold Wagner
Margarita Martinez - Jenny
Jaime Carrillo - Stanley
Jordan Clark - Miss Forsythe
Amanda Spinella – Letta
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