Review: DEATH OF A SALESMAN
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
In his memoir, Timebends, Arthur Miller writes of his first marriage to Mary Slattery: "There was a deep shadow then over intermarriage between Jews and gentiles,....I was struggling to identify myself with mankind rather than one small tribal fraction of it." And so Willy Loman was Everyman, not EveryJew. Until now.
Under Lane Savadove's direction, EgoPo's passionate production of Miller's iconic play, Death of a Salesman, reimagines the Lomans as a Jewish family. The production starts with sitting shiva after Willy's suicide, making the entire play a backward glance.
Savadove treats the play as autobiographical, assuming Biff (Sean Lally), Willy's oldest son, is the playwright's avatar. The audience response on opening night bore this out: suddenly Death of a Salesman was a young man's play: the knowing laughter and the tearful sniffing of the young men watching testified to a shift away from Willy (Ed Swidey) to Biff as the central character.
Biff's brother Happy (Kevin Chick), is determined to carry on his father's values, refusing to see them as dire moral errors. The casting of Biff and Happy is interesting; they look like boys, not like men, certainly not like "Adonises," and this nicely underscores both their arrested development and Willy's unrealistic view of them.
Linda (Mary Lee Bednarek), the long-suffering wife who stands by her overbearing and tormented man, is here less a dishrag than Linda often is. That she and Willy love—and desire--each other is evident. But since this production is framed by Linda—first at the shiva, then at the end, the "Requiem" in the cemetery-- she has more power in this version.
This is one of several troubling aspects of the director's concept: "The play is thus Linda's flashback as she struggles, along with us the audience, to understand the cause of Willy's death." But this means that Linda knew about Willy's Boston dalliances, the stockings, and Charlie's weekly cash donations to the household, as well as all the scenes with Ben that take place in Willy's mind. It also reveals her memory to be guilt-free even after her husband's suicide.
The rabbi is played by Russ Widdall who is very impressive in his multiple roles as Willy's boss Howard, the kind waiter Stanley, and Willy's brother Ben (but why does Ben speaks with an accent—not really Yiddish, not quite Eastern European?).
Accents are something of a problem throughout, since Willy's New York accent wanders into something vaguely Southern. Puzzling, too, is Willy's beard, making him look more like a Talmudic scholar than a salesman who wants to be "well liked" in New England in mid-century. But Swidey's intense performance makes it clear that the entire play is a record of Willy's disintegration, and his breakdown in the restaurant scene is very moving.
Another question is why African American actors play the Lomans' neighbors Charlie (Steven Wright) and his son Bernard (Derrick L. Millard II). Surely in 1948, this friendship would have been remarked upon, not to mention the way many working-class Jews felt about "schwartzes."
And in 1948, Jews in America were haunted by the Holocaust and fearful about anti-semitism; Miller's own ambivalence, even in his overtly Jewish works--Focus, After the Fall, Broken Glass—is complex, so what is gained by this emphasis on the Lomans as Jews is unclear.
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EgoPo Classic Theater @ the Latvian Society, 7th & Spring Garden Sts. Through Nov.9. Tickets $25. Information: 267-273-1414 or egopo.org