Works in Progress Inside five spring productions before opening night. Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf in Death of a Salesman, 17 days before previews. Photo: Mark Seliger Director Joe Mantello has been thinking of mounting a production of Death of a Salesman since 1995. While directing Nathan Lane in Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! that same year Mantello realized he’d found his ideal Willy Loman. ‘I didn’t have a fully articulated reason — I just had a gut sense that beneath Nathan’s comic brilliance was a deep emotional vulnerability and intelligence that felt exactly right for Willy,’ Mantello explains. ‘It was an instinct more than a strategy.’ Lane recalled, ‘He just turned to me casually, put his hand on my arm, and said, ‘One day, we’re going to do Death of a Salesman together.’ It seemed so far away. But I was touched that he thought I was worthy of doing such a play.’ In 2020, when it finally seemed like Mantello’s vision might finally be realized, COVID-19 shut down theaters, and he feared it would never happen. But at long last it’s here, with Lane starring as Loman and Laurie Metcalf as Linda, his meticulous wife. Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers will play their sons, Biff and Happy. (It’s also produced by Scott Rudin, who is attempting a comeback after widespread allegations of workplace bullying and abuse, which he has denied). Though he’s perhaps best known as a comic actor, Lane, especially with those eyebrows, is gifted at slipping into a beleaguered, hangdog pathos, one that recalls a somber period in his own life. The actors Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock starred in the 1949 Broadway premiere of Arthur Miller’s masterwork at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan. They reprised their roles in a 1966 CBS special of Salesman. Lane was 10 when he saw it. ‘I remember being very upset by what was happening to Lee J. Cobb,’ Lane said. A year later, his father died. ‘My own father essentially committed suicide by drinking himself to death, and so there was some connection to that,’ Lane said of the way Cobb’s Willy Loman fixed itself in his memory. ‘He wasn’t a salesman, but he had been involved in local politics, sort of glad-handing and doing favors for people. There was just a tremendous sadness about him.’ Photo: Mark Seliger Mantello has a reputation as a master stager of abstraction and metaphor, be it Angels in America or The Glass Menagerie. Now he brings that penchant for existential weirdness to Miller’s titan of the American canon, ushering theatergoers through the sliding door between reality and hallucination that is Willy’s deteriorating brain. Willy has been in decline since losing the respect of his eldest son Biff, a once-promising high-school football star who fails his math requirement, loses his football scholarship, and discovers his father having an affair on the road. Biff is 34 years old when Salesman opens — the same age as Willy’s tenure with his company — and he’s home with his younger brother, Happy. Linda is greeting a weary Willy, home after a long night of driving up the Eastern Seaboard, because his boss will not give him an office job that would take him off the road. As he’s out of options and down to his last few dollars, Willy goes out of his way to see his neighbor Charley, using the money he borrows from him to keep his life-insurance policy current. Willy realizes he’s worth more to his family dead than alive. Mantello wanted to restore ‘some of the ideas I think
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