And then there’s Willy Loman, the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, whom Miller had the audacity to supply with a surname that immediately suggests his status in the contemporary American world: low man.
Yet, anyone looking to cite the iconoclastic figures of 20th-century dramatic literature would likely place Willy Loman at the top. A few others would, of course, be mentioned as equally or surpassingly iconoclastic, surely Stanley Kowalski high among them.
Yet, somehow Willy seems the foremost, the irony being that Willy sees himself as anything but iconic. He may blaringly announce himself as such, but now that he’s a 60-year-old salesman losing whatever power he may have had when younger, he’s no longer able even to sell himself on his being anything like an icon.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Indeed, in a century when tragic figures didn’t qualify as monarchic as they were in, say, the Elizabethan-Jacobean era, it may not be that much of a stretch to designate Willy as the 20th-century Lear equivalent. Nowadays it might be said that older American actors may just as soon take on Willy Loman as Lear.
So here comes three-time Tony award-winning/seven-time Drama Desk award-winning Nathan Lane, who, yes, distinguishes himself as Willy Loman. (Will he try Lear next or decide there’s no need?) He’s done so but not without some lapses, the most significant his first-act performance of the role.
On entering—not through the Loman family’s front door—he steps from a supposed Studebaker (it’s a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu) he’s driven on stage. There he meets loving wife Linda (Laurie Metcalf, about whom more later) and explains he’s just cut short a sales trip north due to incapacitating exhaustion.
The problem here is that he hardly displays that weariness as he all but indefatigably throws himself into mounting frustration and anger at Linda as well as his disappointing sons, ex-football star/now compulsively drifting Biff (Christopher Abbott) and hapless Happy (Ben Ahlers).
Everything changes, though, when the second act begins with Willy announcing he’s had a good night’s sleep. He instantly demonstrates as much by relentlessly heading through the terminal humiliations he subsequently faces—the hot-headed conflicts with Biff, the ignominies suffered over losing his job, the shame at having to borrow money merely to cover mortgage payments.
It might be said Lane finishes by giving the performance of his life. It might be said, and yet he’s given so many. What definitely can be said is that many previous Willy Lomans have offered superb accounts of the role, and Lane joins them.
What can also be said of this production is that director Joe Mantello—when he directed Lane 30 years back in Love! Valour! Compassion!, they first talked about this venture—has approached the enterprise not as his need to impose radical directorial changes so’s to differentiate this Death of a Salesman from that of predecessors.
Instead, he’s approached the task by doing something more impressively radical. He researched Miller’s initial manuscripts, discovering that the playwright had early on intended to have two actors playing Biff, Happy and less athletic friend, more intelligently accomplishing Bernard so that they can be seen as the boys when younger.
Thanks to several moments—when, especially both the younger Biff and Happy are seen shadowing their older counterparts—this innovation adds an enriching depth to the increasingly darker proceedings. (Is Miller now somewhere blurting “I told you so” to original director Elia Kazan?)
Okay, it is necessary to report that Mantello did take one curious detour. When he looked at Miller’s stage directions stipulating that his depiction of one family facing collective torment mostly takes place in the Loman house, kitchen, bedrooms, et cetera, he saw no detailed description of those and other locales.
He got ideas and has had set designer Chloe Lamford construct a huge gray-black room with columns and one large window that more than anything resembles an abandoned factory. The actors don’t quite get lost in it, but the possibility threatens, as lighting designer Jack Knowles and sound designer Mikaal Sulaiman hop to catch up.
Due to the overwhelming Winter Garden space, the thought does occur that the set was needed to dissuade audiences from insisting that Miller’s intimate play calls for a smaller theater while it establishes broader implications about the deficiencies and demands of American life. (If Lane and Mantello are thinking about following with King Lear next, they already have the set.)
An unmissable asset about this Death of a Salesman is the entire cast. Over the past several years Metcalf has established herself as Broadway’s leading lady. As recently as earlier this season she once again reconfirmed her impressive status in Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road, Mantello directing.
Her loyal, loving, perplexed, often harshly silenced Linda is deeply effective. During her most extended first-act scene, when confronting sons Biff and Happy, she proclaims perhaps the tragedy’s most famous line—“Attention must be paid”—and thereby grabs hold of the production.
Nor does she lose velocity in the second act, which includes a less well-known but devastatingly accurate line about her beloved Willy: “he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor.” No flaws undo any of the entire cast, either, with stand-out Abbott intensifying the stifling air with his final heart-wrenching outcries.
The last undeniable Death of a Salesman irony for this revival: Once again Arthur Milller’s monumental script proves deathless.
Death of a Salesman opened April 9, 2026, at the Winter Garden Theatre and runs through August 9. Tickets and information: salesmanbroadway.com
