Willy is forever manic-a gale of conflicting smiles, folksiness, booming anger, tenderness, and rudeness around his wife, children, boss, neighbor, and ghostly tormentors. Pierce’s performance from the outset is full-throttle this Willy Loman is already over the edge when we meet him-feuding with his favored son Biff (Khris Davis), and barely able to acknowledge the other one, the rootless, sex-focused, and supremely ironically named Happy (McKinley Belcher III). However, these symbolic hammer notes are overdone-They are too literal, they clutter and confuse, as do the actors striking dramatic frozen poses (with added bolts of light), as if in a movement class, to convey shifts in time. The precariousness of Willy’s life is immediately apparent through such design and directorial decisions, as is his lack of control not only over his material and personal circumstances but also the madness-accelerating voices in his head.
Tables and chairs hang suspended from the theater ceiling door and window frames appear and disappear. There is a kind-of-kitchen in front of us (table, some chairs), and a kind-of-bedroom (two lights, platform). It is a kind-of-house in formation and deconstruction, set around a series of platforms. Just as Ben appears from the side of the stage, wreathed in wisps of dry ice, chiding and goading his brother into reaching for the same financial riches he attained, so the show has the air of a ghost story, a tale placed in fragmented snatches of time and reality that Miller writes in the play.Īnna Fleischle’s set is only partly domestic. (Pierce and Clarke are reprising their London roles he was Oliver Award-nominated she won the Olivier and a Critics’ Circle award.) The production is directed by Miranda Cromwell, who won an Olivier Award alongside co-director Marianne Elliott for the West End and Young Vic productions, where this Broadway production originated. The play remains set in the Brooklyn and New York of 1949, and Boston many years before, and while not a word of the play has changed we now see its desperation-of what a family struggling to aspire and succeed, and also trying desperately to stave off failure and disaster-can also be viewed through the prism of race and racism, unseen and unspoken forces accentuating every positive the family grasps for and every negative that may sink them. But in the latest Broadway revival, starring The Wire and Treme star Wendell Pierce as Willy, which opens tonight (Hudson Theatre, through January 15, 2023)-with the Lomans played by an all-Black lead cast-the production’s anchor is Willy’s wife Linda, played by the simply stupendous Sharon D Clarke.Ĭlarke, Tony-nominated this year for Caroline, or Change, gives an intensely moving, beautifully executed performance. It is his flailing death spiral that forms the narrative heart of Arthur Miller’s legendary play. Willy Loman should be the focus of Death of a Salesman.
0 kommentar(er)
