Word: loman
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...spin here, as Booth, the leader of the dead assassins, claims that the combined spirit of the assassins is "the real conspiracy." "In fifty years, they'll still be arguing about the grassy knoll," he says; Oswald will live on in infamy. [In describing the demise of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman--a "nobody" like Oswald--Booth invokes a fascinating element of meta-theatricality:] "Attention must be paid," he says of the assassins. And, as evidence by the Pforzheimer House Drama Society's excellent production, it is indeed...
Someone came up with the less-than-brilliant idea of slapping a '50s-retro veneer on all the singers' clothes and gestures. Rigoletto in hat and coat recalls Willy Loman with a hump; Gilda sports a flaring gray poodle-skirt, a bright red cardigan sweater and ponytail tied with a matching red ribbon. The duke, when he comes a-courting, looks sublimely ridiculous in a red monogrammed vest. Even the courtship scene between the duke and Gilda is straight out of the '50s, reminiscent of that porch swing on a summer night--a worthy tradition...
...American postwar theater are enjoying simultaneous London revivals. Davies (who eventually did direct an acclaimed 1988 National Theatre production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) has staged a hit revival of Edward Albee's masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Diana Rigg and David Suchet. Willie Loman is lugging his valises home once again in a National Theatre production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. And veteran director Peter Hall has imported Jessica Lange to play Blanche Dubois (a role she played on Broadway in 1992) and surrounded her with a British cast...
...Willy Loman, Miller's famously doomed salesman, is also brought down to size a bit on the British stage. In the National's Death of a Salesman, Willy is played by Alun Armstrong (a veteran of musicals like Les Miserables as well as the original cast of Nicholas Nickleby), whose tidy little mustache, hangdog expression and Brooklyn accent anchor him firmly in the dreary everyday. Armstrong's Willy is a small man, too downtrodden even to rail with much conviction. It's an elegant production, the dominant stage image a tree in full blossom, with a broken trunk...
Unfortunately, the cynicism of the present prevents Loman's plight from being "universal," a necessary condition of any tragedy that hopes to inspire the identification of the audience with the tragic figure. The play thus becomes largely divorced from present societal concerns...