3 December 2000: Miller, Death of a Salesman
Schubert Theatre, Boston
Robert Falls’s Tony-award winning production on tour. Willy: Brian Dennehy, Linda: Elizabeth Franz, Biff: Ted Koch, Happy: Steve Cell. Playing time: 3-1/2 hours
A stunning production of the play. Dennehy is wonderful, a great walrus of a Willy. The New York accent is flawless. Lynda’s is a different style; Franz has a tremolo in her voice reminiscent of Mildred Dunnock. Each in their own way is splendid. There is much deep feeling in this production. Falls is quoted in a program interview as saying he wanted to achieve a sense of vertigo, a sense that Willy was heading towards suicide. This accords with Miller’s own idea that if Willy could remember enough he would kill himself.
In pursuit of his sense of the play Falls makes an entire departure from the original production and subsequent productions that followed — i.e., imitated — it. The stage is a double, concentric revolve, and often the main, inner revolve is turning one way while the perimeter revolve is going in the other. Falls replaces the flute music at the start with harsh, ominous orchestral music somewhat like Shostakovich; and the scrim of leaves superimposed upon the residential Brooklyn skyline is gone, supplanted by large — very tall — dark blue-grey scrim panels, in whose center is a large box-wagon with a dark front door through which, at the start, Willy emerges (to great applause), sample cases in hand. There is a kind of double wagon representing Willy’s house — bedroom at audience’s left, kitchen at right. A separate wagon is the boys’ bedroom. The combination of moving wagons, sometimes rotating on a central axis, with the moving revolve provides a very fluid means of scene shifting, while also contributing to the overall whirling effect Falls evidently has in mind.
The production is very articulate and beautifully paced, and the whole is extremely effective, gripping. I have seldom felt such dynamic, electrified silences. Dennehy is not afraid to take his time, and his pauses in the course of the speech are generous — evidence of extreme mental turmoil. When he explains, “The woods are burning!” We readily believe it; we have already known it.
Dennehy is a big, burly, powerful actor with a voice to match. All the actors are miked; sometimes I find this distracting and inappropriate, but here it worked — and I was grateful for the clarity, from the sixth row of the Schubert mezzanine; every last word was audible, and it was only once, when Linda laid her head against Willy’s chest while continuing to speak that her voice got a little bit too close to Willy’s mike (she heard it and turned her head away slightly, at once). The test of a competent miking and sound system is the upper level of volume and decibels. Dennehy’s Willy is an explosive force, at full throttle in many moments; yet I was never conscious of an overloaded sound system. In fact, like everyone else in the theatre, I was deep inside Will