In the latest Broadway revival, the production’s anchor is Willy’s wife Linda, played by the simply stupendous Sharon D Clarke.
, gives an intensely moving, beautifully executed performance. 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, unseen and unspoken forces accentuating every positive the family grasps for and every negative that may sink them.
Anna Fleischle’s set is only partly domestic. It is a kind-of-house in formation and deconstruction, set around a series of platforms. There is a kind-of-kitchen in front of us , and a kind-of-bedroom . Tables and chairs hang suspended from the theater ceiling; door and window frames appear and disappear.
But the Lomans don’t want this truth; just as the floating scene décor and nervy tableaux underline, this is a family in thrall to self-generated deceptions around Willy’s brilliance. They must keep the lie present to keep their flawed emperor on his shaky throne, even though Linda, Happy, and most especially Biff know the emperor has no clothes. Most urgently, Linda knows her husband’s ego and status must continue to be built on illusion and fantasy to keep him alive.
Throughout the show, and amid all the relentless and exhausting male shouting around her, Clarke charts a nuanced yet still tension-filled course for Linda, and does it with such astute calibrations of mood and moment that her journey feels most revelatory. She will do anything to support her husband, and her fierceness translates most furiously to a condemnation of her thoughtless sons.
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