January 29

January 29, 1999

Arthur Miller: Present at the Birth of a Salesman

NEW YORK -- Willy Loman started small.

"That was the idea I started with, that Willy should be small and his wife should be very big," said Arthur Miller, thinking back on the first staging of "Death of a Salesman," 50 years ago. "So we tried to cast all the available little actors, but it soon became apparent that the part was big; it required someone with weight and size and heft. It's like our idea of him grew as soon as we put him on the stage."

Willy is back in the hulking form of Brian Dennehy, whose sagging bulk seems to fill up the entire doorway of his house, when he is first glimpsed, sample bags in hand, in the new staging of the play. It began previews on Broadway last week and opens Feb. 10, 50 years to the day after it was first staged at the Morosco Theater with Elia Kazan directing and Lee J. Cobb starring.

But when Arthur Miller, who was a young man of 33 when the play opened in 1949, looks back on his most famous creation, it is with a distinctly bittersweet tinge. Even more than the actors who portray him, Willy Loman has grown over the years, metamorphosing into one of the most familiar creations of the American imagination: a figure as much a distinct sliver of the American myth as Huck Finn, Stanley Kowalski or Jay Gatsby.

What worries Miller, after a life dedicated to the intimate revelations of the theater, is whether any playwright, no matter how talented, will ever be able to take a character from the stage to the heart of the culture in the same way again.

"Anything is possible, so you would be foolish to write off the possibility," said Miller, who at 83 still has the lanky frame, craggy features and Brooklyn inflections of his youth. "But a play does not exist apart from its audience, and there's no longer a mass audience for theater in this country. Plays now, in general, are written for a very constricted audience, generally better educated, more sophisticated. But the theater has been most vital, most successful, when it's been aimed at a very demotic audience, and it's hard to see that audience being re-created again."

The 50th anniversary of "Death of a Salesman" provides an opportunity for Miller to celebrate and reflect, to kvetch and wax nostalgic, all of which he does with remarkable lack of pretension for a man whose capsule biography usually has a phrase like "greatest living American playwright" thrown in somewhere.

Miller was born in Harlem in 1915 and then moved with his family to the Midwood section of Brooklyn. His father was a well-to-do clothing manufacturer. His mother was the one in the family with artistic instincts, and Miller grew up an indifferent student whose passions leaned more toward baseball than literature. But in his autobiography, "Timebends," Miller talks of his first experience of the stage at the Shubert Theater on Lenox Avenue, where he learned almost unconsciously "that there were two kinds of reality, but that of the stage was far more real."

He went to the University of Michigan, and came back to New York to become a playwright, fusing his instincts about the theater with a vivid and innovative approach to narrative richly informed by his own life story. That personal history included the sometimes harsh give and take of his family, the ravages of the marketplace he saw in his father's business and in his uncle Manny Newman's career as a salesman, a career that ended in suicide, and the social and spiritual dislocations left by the Depression. "I've seen the great ship go under, and once you've survived that you don't ever forget it," he said.

His first Broadway play, "The Man Who Had All the Luck," lasted all of four performances. His second, "All My Sons," ran for 300 performances. The drama, about a wartime industrialist who must accept responsibility for manufacturing defective airplane parts that ultimately led to the death of his airman son, won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1947. It took him six weeks to write his third, which had been germinating for years. "Death of a Salesman" ran for 742 performances on Broadway, won a Pulitzer Prize and created a character so memorable that to Miller the various incarnations of Willy Loman are like old friends: long gone but so vividly remembered they seem alive.

"Lee Cobb had one thing; he was born sad," said Miller, wearing black jeans and a striped shirt and lounging on a couch beneath a Spanish religious figurine in the apartment he keeps on the Upper East Side. "He must have been a sad baby. He could laugh and make you feel terrible. There was some majestic pathos in him that fit this role very well. George Scott had great power and enormous authority. So what you saw going down was a man who was losing his authority, which was very effective.

"Dustin Hoffman was a little different peek at it. I think his Willy started out looking more ordinary, but he grew as the part went on, and all the emotions were tucked into that little body he's got. He was a slightly dictatorial Willy, always ordering people around. And Dennehy is a good combination of several necessary elements. He's a wonderful actor, and he's got that feeling of something of size, like something big being destroyed, which is terribly important. And at the same time, he's got this naivete, like when his smile breaks out and he seems to be enjoying himself."

There are, of course, many others: the Swedish Willy, played by Jarl Kulle; the Japanese Willy, who did it for 30 years, quit at 90 and recently passed the role on to another 60-year-old, who presumably has 30 years ahead of him; the Italian Willy in a sepia-toned poster photograph, looking like a striving, put-upon middle-class paisan hunting for a parking space in Rome.

Miller also has warm words for Elizabeth Franz's performance in the new production as Linda, Willy's long-suffering wife. "She's mounted a kind of wonderful outrage I've never quite seen before," he said.

"Dustin Hoffman was a little different peek at it. I think his Willy started out looking more ordinary, but he grew as the part went on, and all the emotions were tucked into that little body he's got. He was a slightly dictatorial Willy, always ordering people around. And Dennehy is a good combination of several necessary elements. He's a wonderful actor, and he's got that feeling of something of size, like something big being destroyed, which is terribly important. And at the same time, he's got this naïveté, like when his smile breaks out and he seems to be enjoying himself."

Miller also has particularly warm words for Elizabeth Franz's performance in the new production as Linda, Willy's long-suffering wife. "She's mounted a kind of wonderful outrage I've never quite seen before," he said.

Willy's universality has been cited as part of the play's appeal. It is not just beleaguered American strivers who try to get by on a smile and a shoeshine, and even in the great boom of the 90's, the reality of castoff workers is every bit as relevant as it was to the children of the Depression. But one of Miller's strengths over the years has been to write plays able to find root in various kinds of soil.

"The Crucible," for example, used the Salem witchcraft trials as a metaphor for the McCarthy era, but Miller recently wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times extending the metaphor to the political melodrama in Washington. He listens to radio broadcasts of the bloviation with a measure of wonder and professional envy.

"You couldn't dare put this together in a show; no one would believe it," he said. "If I'm going to believe what's going on in the chamber, serious men debating where he touched her, it's like something out of Kaufman and Hart. We are really below sea level on this one, aren't we? But it invigorates the imagination."

Competing with absurd reality is the least of the challenges he sees for the theater today. And for all the acclaim won by his best-known and most frequently staged plays, "Death of a Salesman," "All My Sons," "The Crucible" and "A View From the Bridge," none of his recent plays -- like "The Last Yankee," "Broken Glass," "The Ride Down Mount Morgan," "The American Clock," "The Archbishop's Ceiling" -- have been major successes in the United States. Indeed, the current 50th anniversary aside, Miller remains far more an object of veneration in England, where his work remains wildly popular, than at home.

Miller is not alone in lamenting the plight of serious drama on Broadway, particularly drama that originates there. But he comes to the issue with an authority few others could muster. And asked if a young Arthur Miller today could make a living as a playwright and penetrate the broader culture to the same degree he could 50 years ago, he listens and gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

"It's almost impossible for a serious play, unless it's got some very large star, to come out of Broadway, the main stem of it all," he said. "You would never get the financing. We get our plays from London, and we get them from theaters across the country. I used to defend Broadway as the only place that originated anything. Theaters in other places were only redoing Broadway hits. It's the opposite now. Nothing starts on Broadway. It doesn't have the vigor to initiate anything. So it's really in a decayed position at the moment, and I don't see how it's ever going to improve in our time. What we still do well is musicals, but that's not theater. That's pure show business."

Still, the question emerges how much this matters beyond the provincial needs of the New York theater. If, for example, the culture now gets its memorable, shared, metaphoric characters, whether Michael Corleone or Forrest Gump or Rocky Balboa, from the movies rather than the stage, is there a loss?

"I still think the experience of live theater is unique; it cannot be equated with any of the mechanical forms like TV or films," he said. "Certainly the writer has no similar position. I doubt that a whole lot of people go to see a movie because someone wrote it. As a consequence, the writing is different to my ear, less personal, less revelatory, and what is revealed, or can be revealed, is revealed mostly through the image."

He shrugs. There's no anger, not even much angst, in the lament. After all, the heyday of Broadway drama was long ago. And Miller, for all the grappling with big themes in his plays, seems to have maintained a wry, forgiving eye for much of what he sees. It's not necessarily true in the arts, where he looks at television, for example, and grouses, "I don't think a gorilla could remain interested very long." But it seems to be true in the world outside his window, whether at his home in Connecticut or his apartment in New York, which is cluttered with books, random awards and posters of his plays.

"I watch people standing out in the pouring rain at the movies on Second Avenue," he said, brightening a bit. "I mean nobody rushes to something that gets a good notice the way New Yorkers do."

He glances past the large olive table across the room to the window behind it and the gray soup outside on a cloudy Saturday.

"There are two places to be in New York, out and in," he said. "If you're out, you're unhappy. If you're in, you think you're happier than you were when you were out.

I used to know someone who furnished his whole apartment with furniture he found on the streets. Really nice furniture. But someone couldn't stand it anymore and needed something new. New Yorkers can be very sheeplike, but there's a special kind of energy here, and I don't know if it exists anywhere else."

That could be a dismissive thought, but Miller sees in it not just New York's ultimate appeal, but a flicker of daylight, leavening his own pessimism about the theater. If the winds of taste can shift as rapidly as schools of fish changing direction, who's to say that drama can't have its day again on Broadway?

"The great thing about the theater is that anything can happen," he said.

"Since it doesn't need the mechanization of other performing arts, it changes overnight, for good or ill. So I could imagine, suddenly, three terrific playwrights emerge, more or less at the same time, and we're off to the races. I don't expect to see it, but it could happen, against all odds. You couldn't predict the collapse of Russia or that Clinton would be so popular after all this. But it happened. This could happen too."

The 50th anniversary production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" is now in previews on Broadway at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, 230 West 49th Street, (212) 239-6200. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at 8 P.M.; Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 and 8 P.M.; Sundays at 3 P.M. Tickets: $45 to $65 ($25 for general rush tickets.) The revival opens on Feb. 10.