“To mount an all-black production of a ‘Death of a Salesman’ or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans,” August Wilson said in 1996. “It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large.” At the Yale Repertory Theatre, in New Haven, where almost all of Wilson’s plays were first produced, the director James Bundy has brought together a collection of first-rate black actors, including the commanding Charles S. Dutton (himself a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and an outstanding messenger of Wilson’s work), to perform Arthur Miller’s 1949 “Death of a Salesman.” Wilson proves to have been prescient; the experiment doesn’t work, for the same reason that staging an all-white production of one of his plays would be folly.
To replace the Jewish Willy Loman with an African-American is to change something elemental in the nature of the play’s lament. Loman is driven crazy by America’s obsession with winning. Although he has spent thirty-six years opening up the Northeastern territory for his company, he has little to show for it. Somehow, the Redeemer Nation has not redeemed him, or his beloved but stalled sons. Loman is a monument to envy and its hate-filled agitations—all pluck and no luck. His outraged bewilderment—“What’s the mystery?,” “What’s the secret?,” “What happened?”—is predicated on the notion that abundance is there for the taking. This sense of expectation and entitlement was simply not shared by African-Americans in 1949. “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity . . . that you were a worthless human being,” James Baldwin wrote in 1962, in an open letter to his nephew. “You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” “Death of a Salesman” is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America. To remove from the play—through the novelty of casting—the issues of race, class, and history is not to challenge the imagination but to beggar it. “Death of a Salesman” is about alienation; it shouldn’t be an exercise in it.
The confusion begins with Scott Dougan’s set. Owning your own house, as the Lomans aspire to do, is part of the American Dream, which is why Miller’s script calls for a “small, fragile-seeming home”; the fragility is emblematic of the family’s precarious hold on life. Dougan, instead, gives us a painted scrim of three tiers of tenements surrounding the Yale Rep’s wide proscenium stage. The Lomans, it would seem, live in a first-floor apartment in one of the tenements, in a space the size of an armory—which makes nonsense of the play’s talk about being overheard.
Miller based Willy Loman in large part on his strong-willed, competitive uncle Manny Newman. Newman’s “was a house without irony, trembling with resolutions and shouts of victories that had not yet taken place but surely would tomorrow,” Miller recalled in his 1987 memoir “Timebends.” Willy speaks with aphoristic authority; he is a walking Dale Carnegie course, all positive thinking. “Personality always wins,” he tells his boys, the philandering Happy (Billy Eugene Jones) and his favorite, Biff (Ato Essandoh), a wanderer who “never made the slightest mark.” The sound of Willy’s buoyant endorsement of their futures—“Start big and you end big,” “You guys together could absolutely lick the civilized world”—drowns out a deeper foreboding about his own. “I feel kind of temporary about myself,” he says.
Willy has “his feet on the subway stairs and his head in the stars,” Miller said. The distracted Loman is a figure of towering delusion. “It’s all right. I came back”: Willy’s first words are a lie. Things are not all right, and as he enters, burdened as much by the weight of his deferred dreams as by his sample cases, he is back in body but not in mind. Blacking out, talking to himself, seeing visions, prone to sudden explosions of fury, he is a figure of both awe and awfulness, and, incidentally, a sensational reminder that collapse can be vigorous. Loman’s grandiosity, which makes him alternately insolent and pathetic to the world at large, spackles over his disappointment with himself and his feckless sons. Willy inflates his sales figures, his commission, his accomplishment, and his sons’ potential. “They’ll all end up big—all of them,” he tells his next-door neighbor and only friend, Charley (Stephen McKinley Henderson), whose own son, Bernard (Austin Durant), has grabbed the brass ring and become a successful lawyer. Even when Biff, at the eleventh hour, confronts Willy with the family’s ordinariness, Willy will not accept it. “I am not a dime a dozen,” he roars. “I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!”
Dutton, who is thickset and bald-headed, has a voice that comes at you straight and hard, like a four-seam fastball; at its greatest intensity, it can push you back in your seat. But there is more grief and gladness in Dutton than Miller’s play can draw out. Here he is strongest not in rage but in regret. Of all the losses that Miller contrives to heap on Willy—salary, job, dignity, filial affection—the most heartbreaking is the loss of the ideal of himself as a good father. Loman goes to his death having never understood his sons, or his part in their undoing. He doesn’t know who he is or what he feels; unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, given the casting, this estrangement applies to most of the actors here as well, especially Kimberly Scott, whose Linda Loman is lost in the translation.
“Everything we are is at every moment alive in us,” Miller said. “Death of a Salesman” was a demonstration of this simultaneity, an attempt to “cut through time like a knife.” We are now so familiar with the theatrical trope of flashing back and forth in time within a character’s mind that we’ve forgotten we owe the device to this play. Whereas Miller found a way of making American drama more profound, Les Freres Corbusier are trying to make the American musical more playful. Bring it on! Their newest exercise in travesty, “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson: The Concert Version” (written and directed by Alex Timbers, music and lyrics by Michael Friedman; at the Public), is a smart, vulgar, comic-book romp through history, a sort of “Andrew Jackson for Beginners.” The show stars the droll and cocky Benjamin Walker, as the gun-toting, Indian-hating, land-grabbing Old Stonewall, who “put the ‘man’ in ‘manifest destiny.’ ” The musical hides its rueful satiric feelings about our latest populist President behind a lot of clever burlesque high jinks about our first one. (At one point, the night I saw the show, Jackson threw himself on a female member of the audience and offered to cover her with “popujism.”)
The idea of mixing facts and fun isn’t new, but Les Freres Corbusier find fresh ways of mixing education with celebration. Their faux-naïve comedy gets giddy with intelligence, instead of irrelevance. As the wounded Andrew Jackson and his nurse, Rachel (Maria Elena Ramirez), fall in love, they tease formula Broadway romance and Susan Sontag at the same time, singing in their duet “Illness as Metaphor”: “It’s not blood. / It’s a metaphor for love. . . . / This fever isn’t real. / It represents how I feel.” The quirky humor of the knowing production style, however, is also the company’s problem. In the course of ninety minutes, a certain lyric and visual monotony settles in. Whether Les Freres Corbusier can travel north of Eighth Street will depend on whether Timbers and Friedman can add some emotional variety and characterization to their high camp. But, for the present grave moment, rollicking, in any shape or form, will do. ♦
