Hard Sell.(Death of a Salesman)(Theater review)

"To mount an all-black production of a 'Death of a Salesman' or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans," August Wilson said in 1996. "It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large." At the Yale Repertory Theatre, in New Haven, where almost all of Wilson's plays were first produced, the director James Bundy has brought together a collection of first-rate black actors, including the commanding Charles S. Dutton (himself a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and an outstanding messenger of Wilson's work), to perform Arthur Miller's 1949 "Death of a Salesman." Wilson proves to have been prescient; the experiment doesn't work, for the same reason that staging an all-white production of one of his plays would be folly.

To replace the Jewish Willy Loman with an African-American is to change something elemental in the nature of the play's lament. Loman is driven crazy by America's obsession with winning. Although he has spent thirty-six years opening up the Northeastern territory for his company, he has little to show for it. Somehow, the Redeemer Nation has not redeemed him, or his beloved but stalled sons. Loman is a monument to envy and its hate-filled agitations--all pluck and no luck. His outraged bewilderment--"What's the mystery?," "What's the secret?," "What happened?"--is predicated on the notion that abundance is there for the taking. This sense of expectation and entitlement was simply not shared by African-Americans in 1949. "You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity . . . that you were a worthless human being," James Baldwin wrote in 1962, in an open letter to his nephew. "You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity." "Death of a Salesman" is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America. To remove from the play--through the novelty of casting--the issues of race, class, and history is not to challenge the imagination but to beggar it. "Death of a Salesman" is about alienation; it shouldn't be an exercise in it.

The confusion begins with Scott Dougan's set. Owning your own house, as the Lomans aspire to do, is part of the American Dream, which is why Miller's script calls for a "small, fragile-seeming home"; the fragility is emblematic of the family's precarious hold on life. Dougan, instead, gives us a painted scrim of three tiers of tenements surrounding the Yale Rep's wide proscenium stage. The Lomans, it would seem, live in a first-floor apartment in one of the tenements, in a space the size of an armory--which makes nonsense of the play's talk about being overheard.

Miller based Willy Loman in large part on his strong-willed, competitive uncle Manny Newman. Newman's "was a house without irony, trembling with resolutions and shouts of victories that had not yet taken place but surely would tomorrow," Miller recalled in his 1987 memoir "Timebends." Willy speaks with aphoristic authority; he is a walking Dale Carnegie course, all positive thinking. "Personality always wins," he tells his boys, the philandering Happy (Billy Eugene Jones) and his favorite, Biff (Ato Essandoh), a wanderer who "never made the slightest mark." The sound of Willy's buoyant endorsement of their futures--"Start big and you end big," "You guys together could absolutely lick the civilized world"--drowns out a deeper foreboding about his own. "I feel kind of temporary about myself," he says.

Willy has "his feet on the subway stairs and his head in the stars," Miller said. The distracted Loman is a figure of towering delusion. "It's all right. I came back": ...