Theater review: Arthur Miller would surely have been delighted at the idea of a revival of his masterful play with an all-Black Loman family. It only intensifies the story.
more than 20 years ago. Pierce, you feel at every moment, is playing a man doing his best with the cards he was dealt. He’s always present, huffing and puffing, improvising his way out of trouble, at least until time catches up with him, and hiding his pain. Truly, it’s a rich and moving star performance and the reason to see the show.
Khris Davis, Wendell Pierce, Sharon D. Clarke and McKinley Belcher III in"Death of a Salesman" on Broadway at the Hudson Theatre in New York. Alas, the relationship between Willy and Biff is less secure. Part of the problem is that Cromwell made a choice not to treat the flashback sequences in the play, which explain the present, as realistic but instead turns them into stylized snapshots. And once you have actors doing jerky moments like robots, presumably depicting the flashes of memory, the emotional key of those scenes gets lost and, frankly, this choice prevents this production from succeeding.
Certainly, this play has an expressionistic structure that has to be explored, but there’s nothing nonrealistic about the inside of Willy’s head, which is the play’s main order of business. In fact, it’s the inside of most of our heads and we have to recognize our own regrets; the vision of the past presented here feels pretentious, weirdly cinematic and, well, alienating.
In the present, though, the show is often superb: the scene between Willy and Howard, ruthlessly played by Blake DeLong, is riveting, amplified by unspoken racism as are the scenes with Stanley, played by the same fabulous actor, here taking what’s usually a plot functionary and forging a blend of obsequiousness, kindness and racism, all at once.
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