Biff, who is good with his hands and loves the outdoors, leaves home and abandons Willy's ideas about success, while Hap fully embraces his father's dreams of becoming the ultimate salesman. Willy's two sons, Biff and Happy (Daniel Zelman and Sean Runnette), represent a sort of bifurcated Willy. The instance in which Willy finally turns from that discovery and opts instead to hold fast to his delusions is one of those heart-chilling moments that makes live theater so desperately moving. He is both ancient and adolescent, energetic and bone-tired, and constantly on the precipice of self-discovery. At other times his face lifts up to the light with an almost childlike sweetness and anticipation. But his fists are clenched as he struggles to set things right, because, as he repeats over and over, "the woods are burning" and there is little time left. Willy's back is bent with age as he shuffles about the stage carrying with him long years of deep disappointment.
Willy's madness, his despair and his rage against the truth about himself are delivered by Waite with a magnetic synthesis of pity and dignity. When Waite moves downstage, where most of the moments of the past take place, he ignites the auditorium. Death of a Salesman moves back and forth between reminiscences of Willy's past, in which he replays regret-filled moments in his life, and the present, in which he must face his grown-up sons.
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This inner struggle is poetically captured in Waite's performance, which is the driving force in a production full of powerful performances. The play is about Willy's struggle to maintain his beliefs even as the evidence mounts that he has lied to himself all his life. In the end, he is broke and utterly lost. Thus Willy becomes the quintessential failure. And while he makes a lousy traveling salesman, he has so glorified the notion of selling and striking it rich that he can't give up the idea, even as it's killing him. He's good with his hands, but disdains the idea of becoming a carpenter. For Willy - like Oedipus and Hamlet before him - doesn't know himself at all. He's a workaday stiff, a man caught up in the capitalist dream that says money equals success, and this idea blinds him. Willy Loman, the play's central character, has been called a modern American tragic figure. And the Alley's production, with Ralph Waite's heartbreaking Willy Loman at center stage, is a fully realized and deeply felt rendition of this American classic. The play, which opens the Alley's 199798 season, is one of the most profoundly moving articulations of regret and shame in the history of American theater.
Taking that private emotion and giving it a public face isn't easy, but that's exactly what Arthur Miller managed in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman. In its very nature it is lonely and private. Sadness, the kind that is dark, utterly alone and so constant and deep that it moves into the marrow of your bones, is one of the richest yet most difficult to articulate of human emotions.
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