New Haven Independent

When he wrote the classic 1949 play, Miller wanted to make Greek tragedy out of the small potatoes life of a Brooklyn salesman. Yet Brooklyn is about the only specificity in the play’s otherwise universalized elements. We’re not even certain just what it is that Willy Loman schleps around in those valises of his — light bulbs, perhaps.

For Miller wanted the salesman to be every man who feels low (as in Lowman) down on the ladder of the American dream.

And he certainly wanted to eliminate details of his own Jewish origins in the play, although generations of high school students have written themes on traces of Miller’s own family in the play’s facts; or in its ironic humor; and even the play’s lilting, Yiddish-inflected language patterns. (Local playwright Donald Margulies had his fun in giving bar mitzvahs to Hap and Biff in his Coney Island-based send-up, The Lowman Family Picnic.)

The Yale Rep’s production, directed by James Bundy, stars the powerful Charles S. Dutton as Willy. The production surely also wants us to be race-blind as well in watching a new face in an old role.

This succeeds for the most part when Dutton and company are able to reach the depths of what will surely endure as one of the greatest of American plays, the first in which Aristotle’s hamartia, the great self-blinding tragic flaw, goes democratic, and to Brooklyn no less.

When the play falls from its heights by skating across instead of reaching for its depths, then we can’t help but ask a question. Why is the entire cast black as opposed, say, just this actor or that? What point is trying to be made? Is it akin to an all-female Macbeth that I once sat through?

Perhaps the play is trying to suggest an insight that the collective African-American experience is bringing to Willy’s world. What, then, is it?

Alas, more questions than answers.

During the better part of the first act, despite the long, haunting flute music and evocative set, and the tragic story of man for whom nostrums and appearances matter more than the painful truth that the audience knows is about to strike, the play appears to hit its more humorous beats than the tragic ones.

For example, Willy’s wife Linda, gamely played by Kimberly Scott, tries to distract her beleaguered husband with news that she has purchased a new kind of cheese. Willy comes back at her and says, “Just how can they whip cheese?”

In the audience on opening night, this elicited TV laughs — not, to my ear anyway, the more painful, subdued ache that understands it is coming from a man who feels himself whipped by the world and his fate in it.

When such universality wanes, particularity raises its unwanted (at least by Miller) and distracting visage. The music of the play drops down an octave or two of tension. And we are painfully in that dangerous territory of no longer judging these actors by the content of their stage characters.

The results in considerable patches in the play, especially the first act, are echoes of Tyler Perry or even Willy sounding off at times like an angry booming Ralph Kramden and Linda as his Alice.

Unlike Ralph, Willy wouldn’t slug his Linda physically. But emotionally he has, of course, already sent her, vavavoom, to the moon, way high above the tenement facades and bare tree that still grows in Scott Dougan’s haunting post-war Brooklyn set.

In the second act, after Willy gets fired, Dutton’s body becomes more burdened, hunched, and fragile. His voice, which had been all but deafening with desperate compensating volume, grows reedy and breaks. The kid that he always has been shows its traces, and more attention is definitely being paid.

I wish I felt the tortured quality of Linda’s protectiveness of Willy far more. Yet when he tells her what he has earned on his last sales trip, exaggerating as usual, and she does the math to find they are short even the insurance payment, it feels as if she is working on an arithmetic problem, not an emotional one.

The high dramatic points for me were the several instances of powerful ensemble acting. For example: The restaurant scene when Hap, the younger brother, played by Billy Eugene Jones, hatches yet another doomed-to-fail sports marketing scheme for Ato Essandoh’s Biff. The idea is to prop up Willy’s disintegrating sense of himself as model, father, and provider.

Another such scene: Linda finally confronts her sons with how serious their father’s behavior is. If she must choose between them and him it won’t be her worthless sons: “If you don’t have any feeling for him, you don’t have feeling for me,” she tells them. This nuclear family is in full, headlong, color-blind meltdown.

Or, is the production also throwing down a gauntlet, and perhaps prematurely? Is it saying that thanks to Obama we are now in a colorblind society where everybody, regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin, is losing his or her home equally? (At least the Loman mortgage, one payment away from completion, was not subprime.) Yet then doesn’t the play work against its own deep values in its casting choices? I don’t know.

This play is a masterwork of writing and structure, by turns symbolic (“the woods are burning, boys, where are you!”), a memory play, and an acute satire on the commercialism, materialism, and brain-warping, dehumanizing worship of the goddess of success at all costs.

Because of its richness, Willys in each generation must decide what vein to mine because they can’t do it all. After Lee J. Cobb inaugurated the role, Dustin Hoffman put Willy on the couch. Perhaps to excess, Hoffman explored each Freudian caesura in the salesman’s patter. Therefore we might try to understand why he can’t accept his responsibility for Biff’s failings or even the deep, self-liberating release of love the eldest son offers toward the end, alas too late to save him.

When Brian Dennehy was Willy more recently in Robert Fall’s 1999 production on Broadway, he was matched if not surpassed by Elizabeth Franz’s exquisitely tortured love both for him and her hapless boys.

Thanks to the Yale Rep’s Death of a Salesman, which runs through May 23, we are reminded that the more passionately and truthfully we face who we are as parents, children, and spouses, aching as those revelations turn out to be, the more superficial differences like race drop away, and we are just one generally disappointing, and occasionally noble, human family.

That’s one of the few clichés that Willy doesn’t spout. Yet it is the particular gift of this production.