A scene from the Soulpepper production of Death of a Salesman
In the opening scene of Soulpepper's new production of Death of a Salesman, a haunting melody played on a flute hangs in the air as Joseph Ziegler's depressed Willy Loman ambles into his house after an aborted business trip. The flute is straight out of Arthur Miller's stage directions, but here it inadvertently conjures up memories of the Hinterland Who's Who nature shorts that used to air on CBC Television. It's not an unpleasing resonance: Indeed, director Albert Schultz's production begins like a nature documentary. We observe The Salesman from a distance in his natural habitat, his home, his crumbling castle. He heads into the bedroom, where he talks to his wife Linda (Nancy Palk) about what happened on the road.
Schultz may be taking his cue from Death of a Salesman's unused subtitle: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. This quiet, intimate moment takes place upstage with Linda's back turned to us for most of it. The audience instinctively leans in to listen, as do the couple's grown sons (who never grew up), eavesdropping from the room next door. Like us, they'd rather not hear - they'd rather look away. But, as Linda later says of Willy, a 63-year-old salesman who can no longer sell, "Attention must be paid."
Since Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949, attention has been paid. There are hundreds of books examining Miller's dissection of the American Dream, and Willy Loman has become shorthand for all men used up and thrown away by the business world. Despite our familiarity with it, however, Death of a Salesman is a play more referenced and read than seen. Soulpepper's production, which I attended in its final preview, is the first Toronto production in more than a decade.
It has much to recommend it. As the Loman sons, Ari Cohen and Tim Campbell are excellently cast. Cohen makes Biff's struggle to break through his family's illusions, in many ways, much more compelling that Willy's disintegration. As Happy, Campbell slowly reveals the frightening emptiness at the heart of his superficially charming, pathological womanizer and liar.
In the supporting cast, there is fine work from Michael Hanrahan and Gregory Prest as Charley and Bernard, the well-adjusted father and son neighbours who serve as a slightly overdone point of comparison. (Did Miller really have to make Bernard not only a successful lawyer, but one about to argue a case before the Supreme Court?) Ins Choi shows deep compassion in a brief role as a waiter.
I wasn't entirely sold, however. In one of his many "explanations" of his most famous work, Miller said Death of a Salesman was "a play about a man who kills himself because he isn't liked." Ziegler, however, is one of the country's most naturally likeable actors. He can hook you with a long-winded yarn like no one else, while Willy, if he ever could do that, can do it no more.
Ziegler, his tiny raisin eyes seeming more sunken than ever, does an impressive job suppressing his charisma, but the result is a rather flat performance. He's believably exhausted, but it becomes exhausting to watch. As his wife Linda, Palk gives a uncharacteristically toned-down performance too, and consequently nearly disappears from the stage.
In addition to turning an "ordinary" man into a tragic dramatic figure, Death of a Salesman was also notable for the fluidity of its dramatic world: Willy Loman moves between reality and daydreams and memories from moment to moment.
Innovative at the time, this technique is now commonplace - and it has been much refined. The formal clunkiness of Miller's script is fully apparent here as Schultz fails to smooth out the transitions between Willy's worlds. He never settles on a convention: At the end of one fantasy, Linda and Happy suddenly scramble off stage like mice; in another transition, an actor begins a slow walk when he leaves the playing area; in another, we get an old-fashioned blackout.
Ultimately, however, Willy and his tragedy are just too far away in this production. It left me unmoved.
Death of a Salesman
- Written by Arthur Miller
- Directed by Albert Schultz
- Starring Joseph Ziegler
- At Soulpepper in Toronto