New Plays in Manhattan

Monday, Feb. 21, 1949

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Death of a Salesman (by Arthur Miller; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden & Walter Fried) had Broadway in a fever of excitement from the moment it drew out-of-town raves last month. Last week, on Broadway itself, it caused even greater excitement, drew even wilder raves—"superb," "majestic," "great," "a play to make history."

Though such extravagant language was not justified, it was in some sense understandable. Death of a Salesman is no more than an altogether creditable play. But it is also a magnificent try, concerned with something so simple, central and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it. It reveals the tragedy of a typical American who loses out by trying too hard to win out; it chronicles the propless failure born of the worship of success.

At 63, Willy Loman, who all his life has been a salesman—and never a very successful one—is faced with what he cannot face: defeat. He has learned the go-getter gospel by heart, fervently played the goodfellow game, planted his sons along the broad winning highway, locked himself—and then lost himself—inside the American dream. Whenever the truth has not been fancy enough, he has lied to other people; whenever it has hurt, he has lied to himself. Nor have his sons fared better—neither the boy who loved his father till he found him with a woman, nor the one who has never loved anything but a good time. His nerve going, his job gone, his boys slashing their way out of his dream, the truth clawing down one after another of his defenses, Willy Loman has no prop left except a loyal and loving wife. It is not enough. He can only kill himself.

The play is perfectly titled: Willy is that specific modern product, the salesman who believes that the approach, the personal angle is everything, that the line of talk is far more important than the line of merchandise. The play shows, too, how in terms of self-respect a man's need to be a big shot turns him, with profound self-disrespect, into a bluffer. But Playwright Miller writes only marginally as a sociologist; in the main he writes with a human being's concern and compassion for other human beings, of the muddle that lies deeper than mistakes, of the self-deceptions bred of more than sleazy social values. At its very best, Death of a Salesman confers a bifocal sense of simultaneously making you see what is and what could be—how completely needless are man's blunders, and how entirely inevitable. There especially lies the impressiveness of the play's attempt, touched as it is with the tragic sense of life.