And when I bring you fellas up, there’ll be open sesame for all of us, ‘cause one thing, boys: I have friends. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. “America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. He tells his boys on the return from one trip: Willy makes these kinds of things up out of whole cloth in such enthusiastic, self-and-life-affirming fashion that he himself barely recognizes them for the whoppers they are.įine things like impromptu coffee with the mayor are always happening to Willy Loman because of how well-liked he is, how finely honed he has made his personality out to be. In Willy Loman’s world, deception, including of his own self, is simply a tool of his trade, a self-validating strategy to achieve a desired end. He wants to be loved, received everywhere with open arms, to really have said hello to the mayor of Providence in a hotel lobby, resulting in the mayor’s immediate invitation for Willy to join him for coffee.Īnd after that, non-stop sales to all the mayor’s contacts in the Chamber of Commerce. You know-an account of that other long-running production, with the entire United States as an audience, about a protagonist turning the world upside down by displaying only the loosest and most opportunistic fidelity to the truth. In that sense, the superb local production I saw last week at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse of Miller’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner, headlined by veteran actor Charles Siebert (“Trapper John, MD,” among multiple other credits), could easily have supported a 2016 copyright. If that means calling white black, black white, and then exhorting everyone in his orbit to do the same as he fails miserably and literally can’t make a sale to save his life, then so be it. Whatever will make the contact, open the door, get him “liked” and win him admittance to the buyer’s office for a sale, is what he will do. Willy Loman, the beleaguered salesman of the title, lives nearly his entire life as a matter of expediency. Of particular note for our own era is its devastating portrayal of the wages of deception. One might be tempted to view that as emblematic and perfect for a now hoary mid-20th century period piece, almost quaint in its portrayal of desperate lives crushed by the weight of an outmoded American dream.īut the play is a period piece only in the way that “ Othello” and “The Cherry Orchard” are, which is to say, the “period” it encompasses spans pretty much all of human existence, or at least that in which people have wrestled with matters of conscience and communication, purpose, honesty and authenticity. My tattered, second-hand copy of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” on my shelf now nearly half a century, shows a cover price of 95 cents.
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