Review - Death of a Salesman

I was very fortunate last night – a friend called with an extra ticket to Death of a Salesman and asked if I’d like to join him.  Uh, yes!  I love the play so much, it’s definitely in my top five favorite plays of all time (oooo, blog post idea!  top five favorite plays of all time!).  However, I don’t generally love Philip Seymour Hoffman, I thought the last play I saw that was directed by Mike Nichols was a mess, plus I ADORED the last revival of Salesman with Brian Dennehy and Kevin Anderson, so I was hesitant about buying a ticket.  Voila!  Problem avoided!  J

 Well, the play is still brilliant.  The three hours FLEW by.  I was moved, as I always am, but in many different places this time.  I think the older you get, the more the play resonates with you.  Well, hello, you can probably say that about any beloved work you see several years apart.  But, anyway, I still found new things to marvel at during this production and enjoyed myself quite a lot.  It’s thoroughly well-acted and well-directed.  I think it’s genius to be using the original 1949 set design by Jo Mielziner and score by Alex North.  They lend a timeless quality to the piece, which adds a layer of poignancy to the whole evening. 

HOWEVER.  Sigh.  I hate to have a however.  But I do.  And here it is, for what it’s worth. 

I think the entire cast is at least a decade too young to be doing this show.   Sometimes, it seemed like a glorified MFA project on stage.  Perhaps if Miller wasn’t so continually specific about ages, it wouldn’t matter, but when the script keeps harping about ages 34 and 63, well...  Normally, I don’t care about age – just give me a good performance and I’ll go with it.  But here, I just couldn’t wrap my brain around these people as people  They mainly seemed like actors play-acting.  They did a good job of it, don’t get me wrong, but it did ultimately bother me.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is 42-ish.  So, in the flashback scenes, we’re good to go, but when he’s ‘playing’ 63, you didn’t see the lifetime of exhaustion in his bones.  You just saw a guy shuffling his feet and trying to seem older than he is.  At least that’s what I saw.  Now, there were some moments that were magical and tragic, and Hoffman’s interactions with his brother Ben were terrific (John Glover is a GOD), but he never looked to me like the father of two 30-somethings and certainly didn’t look like someone so dragged down by selling for over 30 years that he was desperate for a desk job and a rest.  

photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

Andrew Garfield may be 29 in real life, but to me, he looks eighteen.  So, again, in flashback, yay, but in the penultimate scene?  When he’s yelling “I’m a dime a dozen, pop!”?  I just thought, well, when you go back to college next week, you’ll be fine.  He just came off as so young, and not beaten.  I always hate to compare performances or previous productions, but I couldn’t help thinking back to the heartbreak of that scene with Kevin Anderson and Brian Dennehy.  That was a middle-aged man completely breaking down and begging to be seen.  Here, truly, it was a needy kid looking for acceptance.  Which, yes, Biff ultimately is, but the kid has to be inside a man.  And I didn’t see that in Garfield’s performance.  Again, it was a fine, well-thought-out performance, just…wrong.  For me.

Linda Emond is, as always, terrific.  Her sudden explosions at her sons were amazing, and the way she helped Willy with his coat, on and off and on and off, was really heartbreaking.  You could feel her deep love and complete commitment to Willy throughout.  And I liked the physical contrast between her and Molly Parker, who played the mistress (Parker was also quite fine).  The boy playing Happy, Finn Whitrock, was extremely good and really captured the second-son syndrome of the character.  The guy playing Charley, Bill Camp, was terrific, as were Fran Kranz as Bernard and Remy Auberjonois as Howard.  Fun note: we were sitting next to Remy’s dad, Rene Auberjonois.  He smelled good.  And we giggled over having better seats than Mandy Patinkin.  Which is immature, but oh well.  Perhaps we were a decade too young as well.  ;)

Oh, heck, everyone was good, it was good, I love the play.  I just didn’t have my heart broken.  That’s why you see Death of a Salesman, isn’t it?  To have your heart broken?  (in the good theatrical way, of course)   But I was touched, everyone had moments of loveliness, just not as many as I would’ve liked.  And maybe that’s my problem and not theirs.  Expectations can be a b*tch.  The show opens tonight, so I’m prepared to read that this is the definitive production of Salesman and none need ever be presented again…

**Five years ago, I saw Talk Radio (Liev Schreiber was fantastic - when is he coming back to Broadway??; four years ago, it was Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, which was 45 searing minutes of America-bashing.  I found it thrilling, but the people behind me wanted their money back...