Word: loman
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...starkly conceived and finely wrought by the author that one expects them to burn star-like upon the stage with their own illumination, with little more help from their actors than a faithful rendition. Death of a Salesman is such a play. Arthur Miller has fashioned Willy Loman on paper at once so palpable and so evocative that he has a real presence in two dimensions even before he has been thrust into the third. Audiences do not come to a new production of Death in hopes of being shown an unsuspected depth in Willy's character. They come because...
...success. Around him is his family, whose empty stomachs have been nurtured on his unsubstantial dreams, and face him now with all the weary pain of the underfed--at once so cynical and so susceptible to one more crumb of hope proffered. The task of breathing life into the Loman family on stage seems like it ought to be so simple--after all, Miller has done all the hard work, hasn't he? The simplicity is doubtless deceptive. But unfairly or not, one tends to feel less than charitable toward a production that does not at least render such...
...sell," intolerably painful. But Goodman plays Willy as a man of no more substance than the dreams he spins--as a buffoon, a con-man who really could be happy selling the Brooklyn Bridge if only someone would buy. But there isn't a member of the Loman family who is deceived by this shabby little dog-eared pack of dreams that Willy has been hauling about--and least of all, Willy. And therein lies the bitter legacy of human grandeur--that unlike the less fortunate primates, we get to chronicle our own spreading stench of death...
Death of a Salesman is getting its zillionth production over at Tufts Arena Theater. The Arthur Miller is as American as apple pie, and undeniably a great play. It's very emotionally and theatrically demanding, though, and it's hard to think of this production doing poor Willy Loman justice. If you've never seen Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock do the play on stage or on television, you might be satisfied with the treatement it gets up in Medford. You can find out for $3.50 at 8:15 tonight and tomorrow...
...PROBLEM with the movie is that it belabors Beatrice's misery without explaining it. Hers is the same struggle as Willie Loman's, but Zindel writes as if he were too cool to identify the cultural forces Miller unveiled. Zindel's tottering steps toward social analysis stop at a symbolism laid on so thick that it is embarassing. Take, for instance, Mathilde's fascination with radioactive half-life, the dominant metaphor for Beatrice's disintegration; or Beatrice's boarder, a vegetable corpse of a woman, with palsied hands, lips curled in like a death grip, and big blind eyes that...