death of a salesman biff and happy scene script

As so often holds true, genius is simply a matter of pointing to the obvious, which the production repeatedly, elegantly, and believably does to one’s shortsighted amazement, and all without ever explicitly mentioning the Lomans’ race or racism. While composer Femi Temowo interweaves music throughout the play to emphasize its reshaped racial dynamics, most poignantly by bracketing Miller’s script with an achingly beautiful rendition of the old spiritual “When the Trumpet Sounds,” largely what’s needed to make this adjustment was always there. Clarke, Wendell Pierce and André De Shields in a scene from Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” at the Hudson Theatre (Photo credit: Joan Marcus) If seeing previous productions of Death of a Salesman has inured you to Willy’s ultimate fate, this one should bring back the tears, and Clarke deserves a lot of credit for that difficult gift. Though Pierce devastatingly pulls Willy apart in front of our eyes until all that’s left is his sense of failure, it’s Clarke who gives Willy’s downfall its saddest dimension, convincing the audience, beyond any doubt, that the very-flawed Willy is loved. Clarke ( Caroline, or Change) as Linda, his long-suffering wife. The play’s West-End co-director Marianne Elliott has not made the journey across the pond with its ongoing contributors, all of whom deserve kudos for the revelatory production, especially Wendell Pierce ( Broke-ology, The Wire, Treme) as Willy and Sharon D. To be clear, the casting isn’t colorblind it’s just casting, with director Miranda Cromwell delicately drawing out a different set of lived experiences from Miller’s almost untouched words.

It’s frequently argued that the play and, more specifically, Willy have lingered in the popular imagination due to the universality of the character’s common-man plight, a contention put to the test, and mostly affirmed, in its current London-to-Broadway revival that includes Black actors portraying the Loman family.

That’s the stark paradox Arthur Miller explores in his classic 1949 tragedy Death of a Salesman through the now archetypal figure of Willy Loman, a past-his-prime patriarch whose invasively halcyon memories are buffers against the realization that a lifetime of hard work and positive thinking, what he considered to be the unassailable twin pillars of upward mobility, have betrayed him.

If nothing else, the American Dream guarantees the right to hope, which is often a crushing privilege. Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman in a scene from Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” at the Hudson Theatre (Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

Death of a salesman biff and happy scene script