Broadway review: 'Death of a Salesman'

Willy Loman, as a character, has achieved a status something like Hamlet's - if you can play the patriarch of what is now a great American classic, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, then you're a notable actor. Lee J. Cobb originated the role on Broadway in 1948, in a Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning production directed by Elia Kazan. George C. Scott played the volatile, delusional man in a 1975 revival, then came Dustin Hoffman (1984) and Brian Dennehy (1999).

Now comes the remarkably intelligent actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose Willy Loman can turn on a dime, as Miller wrote him, even as Hoffman makes perfect sense of the quick mental and emotional shifts. In the tautly directed revival by Mike Nichols, Hoffman telegraphs a fluid, unwavering intensity; he's as tragic, menacing and full of demons when he's at rest as when he's at odds with everyone in earshot.

Miller's story of a New York family with more baggage than a cargo hold, in the mid-'40s when post-war materialism was redefining American values and aspirations, is ripe with tragic figures - and the revival, which opened Thursday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, pays careful attention to every one of them.

Loman is the play's primary character, but what makes this production so powerful is the way Nichols draws clear characters from everyone - even the waiters in a late scene seem to have back-stories hidden somewhere in their portrayals. The formidable Linda Emond is Willy's long-suffering but constantly loving wife; the terrific Andrew Garfield is the older son Biff, whose tangled relationship with his dad is molded to his own personal failures; Finn Wittrock is the younger and much-ignored son, Happy. John Glover plays Willy's brother who's made a killing in Africa and Alaska, and Fran Kranz, is the next-door neighbor kid. Franz takes a small role that's sometimes played as a simple accessory and makes it his.

From its opening, when Willy returns abruptly from a business trip, to its requiem in the final moments, Nichols squeezes these juicy characters. Miller gives Death of a Salesman a muscular narrative arc, and this revival provides the intensity to flex it and strike.

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Death of a Salesman is at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St.