Lemons: Joe Mantello Directs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Laurie Metcalf, a carton of organic milk, and Nathan Lane in Death of a Salesman. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.)

When I heard director Joe Mantello was setting the current revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in a garage, I misheard it as the garage. So I assumed it meant the garage attached to the Lomans’ house. As far as reconceptions of classic American theater go, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. But no: It wasn’t the garage, it was a garage. But what set designer Chloe Lamford provides isn’t even a garage—it’s a huge industrial warehouse with a large rollup metal door and piles of debris and dirt everywhere. (That Lamford won a Tony for her set is far more unsettling than anything in the play.) The characters sleep on metal benches, meals at a metal table, and walk barefoot on the dirty floor. The structure earns garage-icity when the metal door ascends and Willy Loman drives his car into the warehouse to begin the play. (It ends with Willy backing the car off the stage. Symbolism.) I get that the America Dream is a lie, that Willie’s life is a big empty warehouse (I would argue that it’s actually a small empty warehouse), but do you need to hit the audience with a sledgehammer (and an ugly one at that) to make that point? Salesman isn’t a naturalistic play--there are flashbacks and fantasy sequences; Jo Mielziner’s famous set for the original Broadway production was widely seen as an expressionistic wonder -- but when the stage is so bereft of any hint of visual beauty or interest, you wonder why Willy doesn’t kill himself sooner.

Elsewhere on this site, my colleague Steve Vineberg has done a much better job than I ever could exposing Miller’s tinny ideas, banal dialogue, and confusing point of view, so there’s little point in covering that ground again. The problem with this production is the many tinny ideas Mantello spackles on. He peppers the set with anachronisms: the car is a red 1964 Chevy Chevelle Malibu, a model made almost two decades after the play’s 1949 setting. Biff first appears in a t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, an uncommon-to-non-existent look in the late 40s. In the restaurant scene, Happy wears a gold chain, a black silk shirt, and pleated slacks that scream 1980s. And most jarringly, Howard, Willy’s much younger and unsympathetic boss, appears in a zippered fleece vest holding a Starbucks coffee cup, complete with brown cardboard sleeve and plastic top. Since he spends most of the scene marveling at an ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder as if it were the latest thing—which it is supposed to be—he comes off as insane.

Mantello has also decided that the family next door, father Charley and son Bernard, are Black. So when Charley offers a Willy a job in Act II, it seems Willy is turning it down because he’s racist, not because he’s too proud. Yes, the director thinks he’s adding complexity, but when Willy follows his demurral with “Charley, you’re the only friend I got,” it’s not so much complexity as confusion that comes to the forefront. As an example of Miller’s deaf ear for dialogue, Linda’s encomium, “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person,” is often cited, but to my mind, Charley’s requiem speech where he says, “Nobody dast blame this man,” twice, is a much bigger howler. Mantello addresses this issue by having Charley (K. Todd Freeman) hold up a piece of paper and read the speech as flatly and clumsily as possible. My guess is that he’s trying to tell us that Charley’s pompous hooey is a failed attempt to respond to the solemnity of the occasion, but you’re more likely to respond, “Huh?”

But nobody goes to see Death of a Salesman because of the set or “interesting” directorial choices, they go out of obligation to experience an Important American Play and to see great actors essay these roles. Nathan Lane nails Willy’s beaten-down physicality and expertly handles the rapidly shifting emotions of his delusions and grievances. Laurie Metcalf as the long-suffering Linda handles the part with aplomb, although she can’t really make it work, because Miller hasn’t made the writing work. Christopher Abbott, who played Yossarian in George Clooney’s misbegotten adaptation of Catch-22 on Hulu, is uneven at the start—his intensity isn’t always well-modulated. (He also wears a mustache that makes him look seedy, which is wrong for Biff.) But he grew on me as the play went on, and the scene where Biff tries to force Willy to see him as he really is (“I’m nothing, Pop! Can’t you understand that?”) is genuinely horrifying and moving. (It’s this scene that convinces audiences they’ve experienced something great.) But I wouldn’t describe any of these three performances as revelatory. Mantello makes another puzzling decision that is especially detrimental to Abbott’s performance. He double-casts the roles of Biff, Happy, and Bernard, so in the flashback sequences, younger actors play the characters. We don’t get to see Abbott evince the charm and charisma Biff had as a popular high school athlete: we see instead an actor (Joaquin Consuelos) who bears almost no physical resemblance to him at all.

Metcalf, Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.)

The performance I found somewhat surprising was Ben Ahlers’ Happy. (Ahlers is the servant who strikes it rich inventing a new mechanism for clocks in The Gilded Age. Much has been made of the fact that this is his Broadway debut.) I’ve never given much thought to Happy in other productions I’ve seen, but Ahler’s gets at Happy’s essential charm, while chillingly demonstrating there’s nothing underneath it all. His repeated promise to Linda that he’s going to get married (to whom? his dating life consists of one-night-stands and prostitutes) is funny, preposterous, and sad, all at the same time. His eager physicality is that of an untrained golden retriever, everywhere at once, messy and sloppy, but sort of irresistible. That dirty grey warehouse lights up a little whenever Ahlers is around.

Mantello won a Tony for his direction, and the production won best revival. Mantello is an experienced and sometimes brilliant director (his mounting of Albee’s Three Tall Women with Metcalf and Glenda Jackson was spellbinding), but the small amount of things that do work in this conception do so in spite of Mantello’s fussing and tinkering. The audience leaves the theater impressed by the performances and wondering what the hell that set was about. Good enough for a Tony, I guess.

– Joe Mader has written on film and worked as a theater critic for various publications including the SF Weekly, The San Francisco Examiner, Salon.com, and The Hollywood Reporter. He previously served as the managing director for the San Francisco theater company 42nd Street Moon. He currently works at Cisco Systems and writes on theater for his own blog, Scene 2.