Review

The Portland Phoenix reviewed Death of a Salesman in their September 3-9, 2004 issue. This review is also available on the Phoenix website.

Death, no dishonor: Gaslight dignifies Miller

By Megan Grumbling

It’s commonly said that we should work to live, and not the other way around. There’s plenty of truth in that, but it’s also true that our work can be among the most basic sources — or thieves — of our dignity. The classic theatrical exploration of how work plays into one man’s dreams, defeats, and illusions — the recently deceased Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman — is on stage now in a fine production by the Gaslight Theater up in Hallowell.

The salesman is the aging and iconic Willy Loman (David Ehrenkrantz), declining at work and in mind, a dinosaur of a passing age. His oldest son Biff (Tom Dix) has recently returned to the Loman home in Brooklyn after years of rambling, farm-handing, and carpentering out West, while the younger and somewhat invisible son, Hap (Ben Keene), stayed in New York and went into business like his dad. Biff’s homecoming has spawned strife and stirred up the past in Willy’s drifting mind, and the long-suffering woman of the house, Linda (Tamara Kaplan), struggles to champion her husband’s respect.

It’s in the play’s pendulum swings, to and fro in time and Willy’s potent memory, that the story and characters hang. There are weighty contrasts to be drawn in the flashbacks, and the Gaslight cast does fine work in both distinguishing "before" from "after" and leading us to the bridge between the two. The excellent Dix, particularly, is wonderfully elastic as he moves Biff back and forth through time.

His younger Biff, a high-school football star poised to go off to college on scholarship, brims with vitality, at animal ease with his athlete’s body and possessing a visceral confidence. In Dix’s older Biff, disillusioned with his father and his own potential, the power in those limbs is latent but languishing. Torn between the work he loves — none too stable, but done shirtless and outdoors — and his want to appease his failing father, the very movement of his muscles seems frustrated.

Keene’s Hap poses a mild contrast to Biff’s intensity — from a youth scrambling half-heartedly for attention to a confident if vacuous adult no longer in the shadow of Biff’s successes.

In the great role of Willy, Ehrenkrantz has the formidable task of taking us back and forth not just in time but along the man’s manic and confused shifts in temper and conviction. Ehrenkrantz does so with sensitivity and fine physical range. From highs and strides of utter confidence — in Biff’s godlike prospects, in his Chevy’s excellence, in the currency of his own character among the East Coast’s buyers and sellers, in his dreams to grow vegetables in the country, in the worth of his own work — Willy plunges to doubts and feeble pacing. As he does, the height and angle of his body rises and falls with these vertiginous changes in outlook.

"Gee, look at the moon coming between the buildings," he says in a hopeful moment, looking and leaning up through a crack in the vault of Brooklyn brick. A second later he slumps back toward the floor, a droop so absolute that it pulls full through to his downward pointed finger.

Thanklessly charged with trying to balance all this is Linda, a rich, restrained, and subtle character whom Kaplan renders with taut grace. Simmering beneath her Linda’s practiced acquiescence is a tense balance between what she knows, what she won’t see, and what she plays at feigning for the sake of her husband. Her lapses into anger toward Biff and Hap are acute. When she tells Biff what the deteriorating Willy is doing out in their scrappy yard, in the middle of the night, the restrained force of her mixed fear, outrage, and sadness is positively seismic: "He is planting the garden," she tells him, nearly shaking, and it is one of the gravest moments of the production.

Willy is best known for his realization that he has, as he says, "nothing in the ground," and it’s one of the simplest but most powerful metaphors in modern literature. His years of work have yielded desperately little, finally, that can be held in the hand. Whether we want to or not, we live through our work as well as by it. Reconciling that with the conditions of the cold hard world hasn’t gotten much easier for most people, and in 2005 there are a world of reasons why Miller’s paean to the need for dignity still resonates.

Death of a Salesman
By Arthur Miller. Directed by Don Watson.
Produced by the Gaslight Theater at the Hallowell City Hall, through April 2.
Call (207) 626 -3698.