Death of A Salesman
A Review by
Margaret McLaughlin

Death of a Salesman is all about dreams. Wrong ones, right ones and, especially, The American Dream. Arthur Miller's long-lived drama focuses on traveling salesman Willy Loman, who aims to fulfill his dream for success by using the right contacts and riding into the blue on personality and a smile. With actor Hal Holbrook as Willy, the play's stellar cast received an enthusiastic response from large audiences at Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse. The production is touring through April going from Boston to Fort Worth to Denver, Colorado and finally to Cerritos, California at the end of March.

Although Death of a Salesman is nearing the 50th anniversary of its first performance in New York City in February, 1949, the play has uncanny timeliness. Thousands of workers and middle management executives are being thrown out of their jobs because of corporate downsizing and many elderly persons can easily identify with 63-year-old Willy Loman. Despite his more than three decades of loyal service to his company, his employer abruptly dismisses him, without pension or other provision.

Clearly, Miller knew how to deal with topical ideas, but he also explored timeless ones. People unable to see a dramatization will find the play highly readable, along with Miller's published comments about it. They show that he both agreed with and challenged the Greek philosopher Aristotle. That first and best-known drama critic of all time pointed out some 2,300 years ago that of all tragic situations possible, family strife evokes the deepest emotions of pity and fear in an audience, when persons who should be "near and dear" to each other engage in bitter conflict. Miller created just such conflict between Willy and his elder son, 34-year-old Biff Loman. While still in high school, Biff discovered his father's infidelity to his mother. Their battle resolves itself only when Biff, acknowledging the dishonesty of his own life, insists on the end of their "phony dream" and Willy realizes shortly before his death that Biff really loves him. After the funeral, Biff says of his father: "He had the wrong dreams..... He never knew who he was." But Willy's neighbor, Charley, believes "A salesman has got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

They're talking about the dream of Americans or, rather, about two contrasting dreams that run throughout our history. From John Winthrop of the 1630 Massachusetts Bay Colony, who wanted a community that would be like a "city set on a hill," to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous "I have a dream" speech, a number of our leaders have envisioned a society demonstrating integrity and justice.

But the adventurers and freebooters who followed the explorers, along with nineteenth century "robber barons" in industry, all had another "dream": winning a competitive struggle for a fast exploitation of the riches of the New World.

Three characters in the play carry out a self-centered credo like the freebooters before them. Younger son, Happy Loman, competes not only in business but also in sex. His favorite indoor sport is "ruining" the fiancées of company executives and, then, attending their weddings. Happy learns nothing from Willy's demise but insists that his father had "the only dream you can have -- to come out number-one man."

Then, there is Ben, Willy's deceased older brother, who returns in Willy's reveries to boast, as he had in life, about making a fortune in African diamond mines: "When I was seventeen, I walked into the jungle; and when I was twenty-one, I walked out. And, by God, I was rich." When Willy's two sons steal lumber, Ben praises them for acting in a fearless way and compares them to men on the stock exchange. Throughout his conversations with Ben, Willy believes his brother had the answers to life's problems.

Finally, 36-year-old Howard Wagner, who inherited his company from his father, fires Willy as road salesman and refuses to employ him in the home office. Willy protests, "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away. A man is not a piece of fruit." But Howard justifies both using a man and then discarding him by repeating the time-worn slogan, "Business is business."

Since Death of a Salesman made its 1949 debut, various critics have objected to Miller's selecting as central figure a traveling salesman -- often the butt of popular jokes -- because he could not have the tragic stature of classical heroes. Indeed, Aristotle had emphasized choosing a high-born, wealthy man as protagonist -- a personage like Oedipus, king of Thebes. However, Miller argued that the common man can be as fit a hero as royalty when he stakes his life and commits his passions to asserting his dignity. Because Willy's wife, Linda, knows his devotion to his family, she insists that their sons value him: "He's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person." Adept at capturing the rhythms of everyday speech, Miller has Linda express the democratic ideal of every person's worth.

While attending a performance of Death of a Salesman, this reviewer heard only two people criticize the play, on the grounds that it was depressing. But, Miller long ago answered this idea by saying that tragedy is optimistic about human nature, for it demonstrated the courage with which human beings live and die in their resistance to tyranny and to whatever oppression degrades them. Hence, tragic drama exalts us and always shows the possibility of victory.

All three major characters in the play win their victories. Believing that he has failed to meet society's standards of success, Willie sacrifices himself to help his family gain financial freedom through his life insurance policy. His wife, who is portrayed wonderfully in this production by Elizabeth Franz, says the final, meaningful and moving words of the play: "We're free and clear. We're free. We're free ... we're free." Having paid off the mortgage and no longer needing to justify her husband, Linda is reluctantly free, at last, to become herself. And son Biff is free to realize his dream of owning a ranch out West, where he can live close to the natural world. Biff may be the real protagonist of the play, for he is the only person in it who grows, from the rootless boy he calls himself at the beginning, leading a life of delusion, to someone who can say truthfully at the end, "I know who I am."

Death of a Salesman is enjoying a long posterity, probably because it still speaks to us, urging us to know who we are. Moreover, it has the effect on us as audience that all great tragedy has -- that we come out of the theatre better persons than we were before, with our awareness of other human beings heightened and our compassion deepened and made more inclusive.