Biff death of a salesman age8/13/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() And there is one more thread-all are based on real-life events that were either personal or political or both. While their stories may be different, there are common threads among them, including morality, responsibility, compassion, and the fragility of human relationships-especially between fathers and sons. Between 19, Broadway played host to All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View From the Bridge, and After the Fall. Miller wrote his most successful plays early in his career. Miller revealed, "I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing-his sense of personal dignity." It’s clear that the Depression and the after-effects of World War II influenced Miller to write plays about vulnerable, everyday people-working and struggling to get ahead. After working his way through high school and college, a young Miller learned first-hand how hard it could be to make a living in tough times. His father lost his clothing business during the Wall Street Crash and the family had to move to a smaller house in Brooklyn. By the time he was a teenager, his family-like many others-was struggling through the Great Depression. Willy, you haven’t aged a bit.Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915. And, of course, operating the heavy machinery with a steady hand is Mike Nichols, who makes certain that attention is paid to an American masterwork that still has the power to stun, amaze and electrify. Brian MacDevitt’s lights melt gracefully from sepia-tinted nostalgia to nauseous-gray dawn. Jo Mielziner’s original 1949 set design has been scrupulously re-created, and it perfectly captures the play’s mix of household intimacy and urban anomie: the Loman home as a squat cell with shadowy buildings towering behind it. This is the original-practices school of reviving classics: Follow the blueprints, read the instructions and build it carefully. In terms of design and direction, there’s no attempt to tart up Salesman for modern tastes or strip it down for archetypal minimalism (the latter Robert Falls’s valid approach with Brian Dennehy in 1999). As a grieving Linda notes in the play’s incomprehensibly sad final lines, “We’re free.” Willy, comparatively, has it good: the aforementioned policy and a paid-up mortgage. That same grim thought must have occurred to countless citizens in recent years, facing chronic unemployment, foreclosure and crushing debt. “After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive,” muses Willy bleakly as he sees a life insurance policy as the only guarantee of an income for his cash-strapped wife and feckless sons. The scenes crackle, Miller’s poetry sings and the machinery of domestic tragedy clicks horribly into place. If Nichols had cast just the central leads smartly, there would still be plenty to savor, but down the line you won’t find a single weak performance or slack beat in this remarkably tight and muscular staging. It’s the modern family as a failed business model. Willy’s Horatio Alger notion of success-the unfettered individual making his fortune in the world-leads to an atomized clan in which each member is isolated, lonely, unconnected. Together they are persuasive as a real family and as a microcosm of society corroded by capitalism. And Finn Wittrock’s Happy is the eternally neglected second son, using good looks to win the attention from women he never got from dad. Andrew Garfield’s defeated, self-loathing Biff rivals Hoffman for sheer visceral punch. As a paragon of spousal loyalty, Linda Emond radiates rueful common sense as Linda. In fact, the actor’s penchant for weary, bruised numbness actually clears dramatic space around him, letting other cast members fill in the blanks of Arthur Miller’s elegiac wake-up call for American dreamers. He’s also not working in a vacuum, often a danger with celebrity vehicles. In short, Hoffman is stupendous I can’t wait to see him do it again when he’s retirement age. But Hoffman makes Willy his own: stamping the iconic figure with hangdog gravitas, slow-burning humiliation, fast-flaring passion and a genius for making each moment acute and dangerously raw. Cobb was 38 when he originated the role in 1949). Whereas firing aged workers is common enough in business, most 44-year-olds would not be hired for Willy on the basis of youth (admittedly, Lee J. “A man is not a piece of fruit!” To borrow Willy Loman’s orchard metaphor, Philip Seymour Hoffman still has plenty of pulp: He’s 20 years younger than the character he plays in Mike Nichols’s magnificent, bracing revival of Death of a Salesman. “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away,” rages the soon-to-be cashiered salesman, far past his prime, with a head fogged in memories and a heart in shards. ![]()
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