Death of a Salesman

As part of their 2024–25 “American Dream” season, PlayMakers Repertory Theater, on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill, presented Death of a Salesman for the first time in thirty years, which is surprising. It is a shame that a literary piece with a Pulitzer-Prize reputation took so long to appear once again on the Paul Green stage, even if other plays by Arthur Miller are in the company’s semi-regular rotation. Granted, “that damned disturbing play,” as Elia Kazan once christened it, can often be challenging for contemporary audiences to warm up to. The business world, commerce, romantic relationships, and society in general have changed considerably since 1949, something Miller himself acknowledged in the late 1990s. Yet, its core message, timeless as it is, of the inherent dangers of selling oneself, body and soul, to that American Dream, along with its effect on the family and the dark underside of capitalism, is something that any generation can relate to on some level. PlayMakers ensures its audience leaves with that understanding intact.Nowhere is this more apparent than the exceptional set and lighting design. This was Scenic Designer Jan Chambers’s farewell production before her retirement and her artistry is certainly on display for her last hurrah, exhibiting a unique marriage of the traditional and expressionist. The overall structure is clearly based on Jo Mielziner’s original 1949 stage design, even paying homage with the open triangle of the Loman’s “roof” hanging above the stage. Chambers also wants to convey Willy’s feeling of being “boxed . . . in here. There’s more people! [. . .] Smell the stink from that apartment house! And another one on the other side,” with furniture very tightly packed onto a two-tier platform, compacted and cluttered with knick-knacks.To add to the feeling of gloom, nearly every prop on the stage is painted matte black, creating an aura of claustrophobic depression that even those golden flashbacks in Willy’s memory (and a subsequent change in bright lighting for the audience) can’t quite eradicate. With the help of a fog machine sending billows of mist through eerie gray lighting, a tree bearing no leaves looming over the side of the house, and a “front lawn” made up of nothing but patches of dry gravel, we can sense that this is a home which, like the tree outside, is already dead or dying. “The grass don’t grow anymore,” says Willy and it’s easy to see why. Items such as garden tools, bicycle parts, and sections of broken furniture (also all painted black) tumble out of the “cellar” on both sides of the stage, like an accumulation of family memories and emotions ready to burst at the seams. A large screen behind and above the stage cleverly helps frame each scene with appropriate shifting backdrops, and Willy’s car lights and the hum of the engine are simulated with such realism in the first and last moments of the play, thanks to excellent lighting and sound by Carolina Ortiz Herrera and John Gromada, that it gives the audience a natural trepidation, as one feels the theater itself is the Loman home and we are anxiously awaiting Willy’s arrival or fatal last drive.Anyone familiar with Death of a Salesman will already have their own quintessential version of Willy in their heads, expecting the actor to live up to a particular standard set in place by previous thespians. Jeffrey Blair Cornell’s rendition defies those expectations. To begin with, as the actor is neither short nor stocky, the emphasis is off Willy’s physical appearance; he instead complains of being called “The Bozo” by his fellow salesmen (no shrimp or walrus here) and is played with a sort of scatterbrained laziness that might live up to the insult. In fact, Cornell’s Willy does not seem to be grappling with inner torment at all. He is tired, yes, but he is not inflated with grandiose ideas of who he is nor battered by any kind of disillusionment. He is a man who does not think deeply, either about himself or anything else. His mannerisms, voice, and expressions project an aging, confused man who failed to pay much attention to what was going on around him or simply didn’t care, and now his childish apathy of the past thirty-odd years has come home to roost.Willy’s wife, Linda, played by Julia Gibson, responds to her husband’s whims in an empty, rehearsed, simpering tone, as if she has given up any real display of her personality long ago and is now coasting on plastic-smile autopilot. When she tells her sons that it’s “so hard to say a thing like this” as she relays her fears of Willy’s possible suicide, it is difficult to believe her, as her restrained, robotic emotion does not quite match her words. Her private anger in confrontation with her sons can never fully reach its fiery peak and it is not until her closing speech at Willy’s graveside (“Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry,”) that we see her façade finally break down as she indeed weeps bitterly, nearly falling to the floor as the lights come down.If Cornell and Gibson’s Loman couple are presented as lost and clueless, Allen Tedder’s Biff represents a grounded reality. This Biff is fueled by anger because he sees what his father does not, but there is a different level of maturity here that plays off Matthew Donahue’s bouncy, youthful, but deluded Happy, even in moments when Biff is floundering from his own mistakes. From the way he carries himself to his assertive, serious voice (a marked contrast with Willy’s sing-songy speech and Linda’s reedy, whine-like intonation), Tedder carries every significant scene with such self-awareness that one is almost persuaded there is still hope that Willy can be woken up from the mental haze he is wandering around in if only Biff could talk some hard sense into him. As we know, it produces nothing in Willy, but when Biff tells his brother “I know who I am, kid,” after his father’s death, there’s no doubting his word.Although this production could be easily labeled as traditional, there are a few small details that strike differently. Charley and Bernard, played by Samuel Ray Gates and Nate John Mark, are both African American and speak with strong Southern accents rather than Brooklyn twangs. One might assume that Director Michael Wilson wants to touch on race relations in a pre-Civil Rights era New York or focus on a Black family’s socioeconomic success in comparison to the Loman’s, but none of the actors play into this and the situation remains decidedly color blind.Furthermore, in a very puzzling bit of blocking, Willy’s scenes with the Woman have absolutely no physical contact—they never kiss, touch, act flirtatious or even stand close together, so Willy’s exclamation of “Well, bottoms up!” in the hotel room is said with a smile and a simple shrug as they stand at least three feet apart. If it weren’t for the suggestive saxophone music, the lines in the script that describe their affair or the Woman bursting into the room with a slip on as Biff shows up to the hotel in Boston, their interactions would almost lend credence to Willy defensive lie that Miss Francis’s room down the hall really was being painted.As the play ends, it is once again Chambers’s set design that is the highlight. For the duration of the play, the stage’s trap door, an oblong rectangle, is the entrance to the Loman’s cellar, featuring a railing on its three sides. As the Requiem begins and Willy’s funeral has just ended, Happy and Biff lift the railings away in unison and as Charley, Bernard, and Linda approach, we clearly see how the cellar where Willy intended to kill himself also now doubles as his grave—a symbolic nod to the theme of death and suicide that overshadows this production in such vivid detail.How the hunger and desire for the American Dream can kill is one facet of Miller’s play that Wilson and his ensemble underline successfully, thanks to arresting visuals and staging. Yet, it is also a cautionary tale of how indifference and self-indulgence within a family dynamic can implode its already brittle cohesion when its foundation is concocted of falsifications. Hats off to PlayMakers Repertory Theater and its incredible cast for delivering that lesson, in such a moving, memorable manner.