Theater review: Dallas Theater's 'Death of a Salesman' is a starkly powerful production
09:08 AM CDT on Saturday, April 24, 2010
By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News
ltaitte@dallasnews.com
For several generations now, students have slogged out papers debating whether Death of a Salesman fits the classic definition of a tragedy. In the Dallas Theater's new production, it's a foregone conclusion: Arthur Miller's play gets precisely the same treatment the company might give Oedipus Rex or King Lear.
Designer Daniel Ostling gives us no scenery in the traditional sense. Frankly visible stagehands move pieces of furniture on and off the thrust stage. Great panels slide back and forth behind the acting area to demarcate the changes between present and past, reality and memory.
With one exception, director Amanda Dehnert has cast the play with company members or Southern Methodist University students. The actor's race and body type don't seem to matter much, and the style is formal rather than naturalistic.
If you're comfortable with this approach to what still feels like an up-to-the-moment look at American life and values, the production that opened Friday is a starkly powerful one.
The salesman at the center of the tragedy, Willy Loman, is both very large (in his own imagination) and very small (in the mark he makes on the world). The show's single guest star, Jeffrey DeMunn, doesn't have the physical bulk to suggest the character's paradoxical grandeur. But he's extremely effective in showing us the man's collapse, and he makes the transitions between fantasy and reality quite clear. Miller first wanted to call this play In His Head, after all.
The heroic thrust in this interpretation comes from Sally Nystuen Vahle as Willy's wife, Linda, and Sean Hennigan as his neighbor, Charlie. Most Lindas are older performers who spruce up to pass for younger in the flashbacks. Vahle looks shockingly old when we first see her, partly because we know she's not. Playing the younger Linda, closer to her own actual age, Vahle is wonderfully warm, protective and even witty.
Hennigan's gruffness in his first scene with Willy shocks us into a reality that the leading character just can't tolerate. In the play's great final scene, Hennigan invests the famous lines about a salesman's life with a lyrical passion worthy of Sophocles or Shakespeare. Vahle then tops him with an original and heartbreaking reading of Linda's final monologue.
Matthew Gray and Cedric Neal as the two sons whip up some disturbing emotions without once relaxing into a natural take on their characters. Gray's Biff never seems credible as a former star athlete, and he's all too boyish in the flashbacks. Hap should radiate the macho ease of a Dean Martin, but Neal always seems guarded and self-aware. The big confrontations between father and sons or brother and brother grip you, nonetheless.
Pity and terror, that's what Aristotle said tragedy should produce. This Death of a Salesman certainly invokes pity. Maybe you have to be in the selling game to pick up on the terror.
Plan your life
Through May 16 at the Wyly Theatre, 2400 Flora St. Runs 190 mins. $15 to $85. 214-880-0202, www.dallastheatercenter.org.
DTC's Salesman Has The Goods
By Elaine Liner Thursday, May 6 2010
The Dallas Theater Center's production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a harder sell than a new grand opera about a Great White Whale. The night I saw the play, there were 150 patrons in the 575-seat Wyly Theatre.
But whatever reasons you thought you had for not wanting to spend an evening with this 1949 tragedy about a 60-year-old man losing his mind and the only job he's ever had, forget them. You must see it. Go tonight. It isn't just the best production yet on the main stage at the Wyly (the theater opened last October), it's the best big piece of drama by DTC since Kevin Moriarty took the job as artistic director of the company three years ago.
The actors, all but one local, are exceptionally strong. In the lead as Willy Loman is New York import Jeffrey DeMunn, wearing padding under his rumpled brown suit but still recognizable from appearances on TV's Law & Order and in the films The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. From his entrance, dropping two heavy sample cases as he returns home from the road, DeMunn's Willy Loman is stooped and fragile. DeMunn is an actor of slight build anyway—more Dustin Hoffman than Brian Dennehy—and he shrinks further as the weight of memories and delusions bear down. At one point in the second act, DeMunn sinks to his knees, dwarfed by the vast expanse of black floor around him. It is a sad and stunning image, one of many in this production. (Scenic designer Daniel Ostling, keeping the large space free of clutter, pulls off one visual knockout after another.)
This Salesman is worth seeing for DeMunn; he's that good. But surrounding and supporting him are 11 other fine actors, some DTC company members, some drama students from Southern Methodist University. Under the direction of Amanda Dehnert, this cast does surgically precise, intensely connected ensemble work.
Miller's play presents staggering challenges. Willy's sons Biff and Happy (played by DTC company actors Matthew Gray and Cedric Neal) jump in flashbacks from their 30s to their teens. Willy and wife Linda (DTC company member Sally Nystuen Vahle) also turn back the clock, looking and behaving 20 years younger than in most of the play. Vahle handles the transitions particularly well, taking a fresh, quiet but firm approach as the one member of the Loman family who lives in the here and now. In the "attention must be paid" speech, pleading for some kindness toward Willy, she is like no other Linda I've ever seen. She's better.
The only gimmick here is the "colorblind casting" of African-American actors as son Happy and as Willy's wealthy older brother Ben (Hassan El-Amin). But Miller himself claimed that these characters exist only in Willy's mind. So why not make them literally and visually "other"?
As a timeless piece of theater, everything Death of a Salesman says about the empty dreams and mental crackups of men like Willy Loman, and the frustrations sons like Biff have with a father's expectations, still resonates. It is the kind of play, as Miller once wrote, that puts into words the "unsingable heartsong the ordinary man may feel but never utter."
Something beautiful and extraordinary happens between actors and audience in this play at DTC. Without any of the high-tech gadgetry that can make a whaling ship and its crew sink beneath the sea before our eyes, but with plain words spoken by people on a nearly empty stage, we are privileged to witness what Miller called "the naked and direct contemplation of man." Sometimes that is spectacle enough.
by GARY COGILL
WFAA-TV
Posted on April 23, 2010 at 10:00 PM
A Pulitzer Prize-winning classic by Arthur Miller opens Friday at the Wyly Theatre in Dallas.
The Dallas Theatre Center's production of "Death Of A Salesman" is emotional and powerful.
The play is a monumental piece of American theater and the current staging at the Wyly is a powerhouse production.
At center stage, you'll find film and Broadway veteran, Jeffrey DeMunn, as Willy Loman.
He is a dreamer in crisis: a failing salesman with a wife who loves him dearly and two confused sons.
DeMunn's performance is so spot on, so multi-layered, so complicated, it's a marvel to watch. So is resident actress, Sally Vahle, as his wife, Linda Loman.
This stark, compelling, intimate production builds tension like a pressure cooker and includes a knock-out performance by Matthew Gray as the wandering son, Biff.
Director Amanda Dehnert's choice to use lighting for location, rather than building a literal set, is a stroke of genius that ultimately pays off in Miller's tragic conclusion.
"Death Of A Salesman" runs three hours with an intermission, and you won't find a better local ensemble of actors anywhere, anytime.
E-mail: gcogill@wfaa.com
