Every few years, well, maybe every decade, it’s good for the soul to revisit a theater classic.
Rec Room Arts delivers with a revival of Arthur Miller’s iconic Death of a Salesman (1949). The Alley Theatre presented this classic in 2012, so it’s about time for another visit. While Rec Room’s production isn’t definitive, Miller’s monumental drama of Everyman Willy Loman crushed by his own false dreams and the resultant casualties inflicted upon his family, hits all the high points of Miller’s vaunted and much-lauded play. The results are clear and affecting, even though the overall results become a bit muddled and hazy.
Miller wrote his play as a memory. He plays with shifting time as Willy relives the past while also living in the present. His life becomes a continual time bend. Miller’s playing with time gives the drama a most prescient present tense. For all the late ’40s trimmings, Salesman, in structure, has a most contemporary feeling.
It dazzled audiences with its fluent cross-cutting between present and past. Past hallucinations collide fast and furious with the here and now. His original title was Inside His Head. Characters from yesteryear appear through a doorway or walk into view while Willy Loman (a vibrant, ranting David Rainey) is still living in the present before being forced into the past. It’s a potent portrait of a breakdown within 24 hours, and it as relevant as it was four years after the end of World War II.
Hail fellow and well met, Willy arrives home after a failed sales tour. Broken and bent, carrying his two valises – suitcase and wares – he’s too proud to admit defeat; his American dream too potent for failure. A smile, a firm handshake, and a gift of gab is all that’s needed for success in selling. But he’s lost the touch. Too old, too fragile, too old-school, he can’t cut it.
But his faded dreams live on in his two sons, Biff and Happy (powerful Brandon Carter and hot-to-trot but equally powerful Kendrick Brown). He imbues them with his past glory, fills them with rosy futures they can’t deliver, and refuses to see them as the failures they have become. Wife Linda (Kaci M. Fannin, in a pastel performance among the vivid colors from the others) will brook no disrespect for her husband. She loves him unequivocally, stands by her man, and supports him without question. She remembers his past vigor and is blind to his indiscretions and failing mental health.
Other memories that spur his growing psychosis are his dead older brother Ben (a delightfully joyous Bryon Jacquet in tropical planter mufti) who made a fortune in diamonds; neighbor Charley (salty Jack Young) who lends Willy money when bills are due, and whose nerdy son Bernard (Cameron O’Neil) is a constant thorn to Willy for his subsequent success as a lawyer, in contrast to his own ne’er-do-well sons; Howard (Brock Hatton), young scion of the business Willy has worked for 34 years, who ultimately fires him; the Woman (Heather Hall), whom impressionable Biff discovers with his father which leads teenage Biff on a tragic downward spiral; Miss Forsythe (Anna Flynn) and Letta (Eva Catanzariti), two prostitutes picked up by Happy and Biff when they should be dining with their father; and waiter Stanley (Kory Laquess Pullam).
These ghosts haunt Willy, tempt him, tease and mock him. What went wrong? is his constant cry. What’s the secret? How does one succeed? Why can’t I?
It’s a plea all of us can relate to – which is Miller’s most resonant, forceful theme At the denouement, Biff screams at his father that both of them are “a dime a dozen.” Neither are special and never will be. They’re ordinary men, and believing the opposite is false and deadly. Accepting this truth is anathema to Willy – and his downfall.
Director Matt Hune keeps the drama on a slow boil, which makes the play drag slightly when it should skitter. It feels like its three hour length. There is a constant push and pull throughout as the arc of emotion is brought forth and then recedes. This ebb and flow is mother’s milk for Miller, a master craftsman of theatrical tension as he builds a scene to its most salient point, backs off a bit, then builds to an even greater climax. Fannin’s hazy performance in “sotto voce,” often turned away from us, doesn’t help the flow. In one scene, she’s on the telephone to her son after discovering the rubber tube by the basement gas pipe, evidence of Willy’s aborted suicide, but she’s holding the phone downstage directly in our line of sight which mutes her voice at her most important moment.
Rainey makes a turbulent Willy with his bluster, disappointment, incipient madness, and unalloyed heartbreak as he fails to live up to his own expectations. As life and his personal Furies buffet Willy into submission, Rainey deflates. He becomes physically smaller as the play proceeds. It’s a wondrously detailed portrait.
But why master designer Stefän Azizi has placed the Loman’s Brooklyn home in the Ozarks is a mystery. The slatted walls, like a house stripped down to the studs and exposed to the underlying ship lap, looks wrong for this broiling memory play with its aching universal theme. We’re not watching Li’l Abner, you know. And there are strange pulsing lighting effects by Cassidy Stanley with accompanying thumps from sound designer Robert Leslie Meek that punctuate the drama at the most obvious of times. These distractions don’t illuminate, they distract.
Even with these limitations, Rec Room’s Salesman is required viewing. There’s plenty that it gets right; Miller sees to that. The play was an instant hit upon its premiere, and Miller became a household name along with contemporary Tennessee Williams. American theater was reborn. Salesman’s clout has not diminished in nearly 80 years. Its superior power is above reproach and will be performed for centuries to come. But don’t wait. See it now.
Death of a Salesman continues through April 5 at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays at Rec Room Arts, 100 Jackson. For more information, call 713-588-9403 or visit info@recroomhtx.com. $26.50 – $51.50.
