You’ve probably heard the phrase “the weight of the world on his shoulders.” But you haven’t seen it—really seen what it means—until you’ve seen Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
Thankfully, Showtime filmed the 1999 Robert Falls–directed Tony-winning Broadway revival, and the Goodman Theatre and Playbill are streaming it free through Oct. 25 to benefit the Actors Fund; so now’s your chance.
When Dennehy lumbers through the doorway, his exhaustion is palpable. He’s holding two suitcases, but that’s not all he’s carrying. The hundreds of miles per day he’s been driving for 30-plus years as a salesman. The monthly bills looming. The promise that his sons, Biff (Ron Eldard) and Happy (Ted Koch)—especially Biff, a high school football star and the apple of his father’s eye—exhibited for decades, but never realized. Dennehy’s Willy Loman stands 6 feet, 3 inches tall and is built like a defensive lineman, but as he leans his arm against the doorframe he looks as if he could drop to the floor at any minute.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★★ review here.]
“A lot of people think he’s lost his—balance,” Linda (a staggeringly good Elizabeth Franz), Willy’s devoted-almost-to-a-fault wife, explains to their sons. She prefers to see him as simply “exhausted,” which is certainly true. But Falls’ production does a brilliant job keeping Willy precariously off-balance, moving him between the grim present and the sunny, too-glossy (possibly manufactured) past. At first, we see the signature salesman that his straight-talking, good-hearted neighbor Charley (the late Howard Witt, wonderful) eulogizes—“the man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.” But the sparkle and the grin soon begin to fade. As the set pieces circles around him, Willy stumbles from scene to scene—becoming less and less visible to those around him.
When Willy pleads for an ever-shrinking weekly stipend from the company to which he’s dedicated his whole life, he seems to get smaller and smaller: “If I could take home—well, sixty-five dollars a week, I could swing it”; “All I need to set my table is fifty dollars a week”; “If I had forty dollars a week—that’s all I’d need.” The much-younger boss, Howard (Steve Pickering), is unmoved. “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away,” Willy explains. “A man is not a piece of fruit!”
That analogy may be lost on the thick-headed Howard, but not on viewers. How many orange peels have been thrown away in 2020? Though Salesman is set in the late 1940s, it resonates all too well, painfully well, today. According to The Wall Street Journal, 22 million jobs were lost in March and April, and as of Oct. 10, there were still about 8.4 million Americans collecting unemployment benefits. How many Willy Lomans are among those millions? As Linda tells her sons: “His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.” Leaning over her husband’s grave, Linda says she isn’t able to cry. Meanwhile, Miller’s play‚ and this definitive production, have entirely the opposite effect.
Death of a Salesman is streaming free on demand until Oct. 25 at 11:59 p.m. CT at goodmantheatre.org and playbill.com. Click here to donate to the Actors Fund.
