Arts

In an era of ever-more-shocking wealth, Arthur Miller’s iconic striver feels more relatable than ever—and not just in the cheap seats.

When Nathan Lane, who stars as Willy Loman in the new Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, reaches the moment in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play when Willy excruciatingly devalues himself as he begs for his job, the actor feels the “powerful effects” of his words on the audience. “I don’t need much anymore,” Arthur Miller’s iconic protagonist insists to his boss, saying he will work for $65, even $50 a week. Then: “If I had $40 a week—that’s all I’d need.”

When Lane recites those lines, “I hear the audience gasp, then weeping in the dark, then a kind of silence,” he says. “At those moments you think, this story is still hitting you in the gut. Willy is fighting for his life in every scene.”

Those gasps don’t come only from the cheap seats. Willy’s tragically flawed desperation, which dates back to when the play was first performed on Broadway in 1949, echoes the struggles of many today who feel they’ll never reach the place they want to be—a group that today includes even the endlessly striving rich. After all, how can a mere millionaire measure up in an era when the .01 percent are popping out to space on a whim, when Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, could become a trillionaire within the next year, and when Mark Zuckerberg reportedly dropped $170 million on a yet-to-e-completed estate on Miami’s ritzy Indian Creek Island—which likely won’t be his primary residence. “It never seems to be enough,” Lane says of the ambitions of the super-rich.

Joe Mantello, director of the current Salesman revival, says, “The anxiety about whether your life adds up, or whether you’ve somehow fallen short of the promises you’ve made to yourself, seems incredible contemporary. Today it might be about visibility, status, or staying relevant—but the engine underneath feels very similar to Willy’s.”

Willy’s struggle—and his relationships with wife Linda (played in the revival by Laurie Metcalf) and sons Biff and Happy (Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers)—has been interpreted as the distillation of the impossibility of the American dream and how ideas about success can warp loving relationships.

Lane namechecks other notable Lomans who have preceded him, including Lee J. Cobb, Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Antony Sher, and Wendell Pierce. Lane recalls being “very upset,” at age 10, watching Cobb, who played Loman in the original Broadway production, reprise the role in CBS’s 1966 TV adaptation. “I remember Linda saying to Biff, ‘Be sweet to him…he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor.’ That stayed with me. Willy is a victim of misreading what the American dream is.”

Susan C.W. Abbotson, a professor of English at Rhode Island College and former president of the Arthur Miller Society, says Salesman remains popular “because it’s about so many universal things, like responsibility to yourself and others. Willy is not a good father or husband, but we feel sympathy for him because of the terrible things he endures. The play remains relevant because we are caught in the nightmarish world he is caught in. Like Willy, so many people feel as if they are shouting into the void.”

Accentuating that link to today, Mantello has set the revival “in a kind of suspended time,” so the audience “experiences the story as something happening now, rather than something they’re observing from a distance.” And so a drama set in the late 1940s feels joltingly contemporary. “It’s a classic play for a reason,” Lane says. “It’s relevant whenever you do it.”

When people ask, “Why are they doing Death of a Salesman again?” Lane’s response is simple, “I don’t think you can see this play too much.”