It can’t happen in movies, it can’t happen on TV, but it can happen in the theatre. A light has been turned on, or they’ve seen something in themselves, or they feel something that they haven’t felt in a long time. “Taking the curtain call is fascinating because you look down and you can see the first five rows of the audience and the expressions, especially on the men’s faces. Recognition extends beyond the footlights, too. That image helped me so much in understanding who Willy is - that, and having seen that guy myself many, many times.” Lines of past and present - lines separating one place from another - have been erased. Miller, in one of his essays, likens him to a well-dressed man in the subway with his case between his legs, holding on to the strap, talking to himself, having a real conversation with someone who’s not there. And, through all this, Willy keeps slipping out of focus. His son is chafing, desperate to express the truth to Willy about who he is. He loses his job and is forced to deal with that. Says Dennehy, “Half the play takes place in Willy’s mind, and half in the real world on the last day of his life when all kinds of things are happening to him. Mind you, the play’s a bumpy, maze-riddled ride as Robert Falls has envisioned it - a dimly lit labyrinth leading to the grave - and Willy reels around in it in chronic confusion, battered on one side by bitter realities and on the other by mad flights of fantasy. I don’t want to find easy ways to the audience.” I don’t want to start looking for pity or sympathy. I don’t want to `improve’ my performance. I don’t want to do what Lee did, according to Arthur. I’ve made some intellectual leaps, and I have to resist following that knowledge. At some point in the rehearsal process, I realized the smartest thing I could do as an actor was to throw myself at it and not understand it because Willy doesn’t understand it. If he can just knock them down, he can get to that bright, sunshiny expanse of open land he has been promising himself was there his whole life - and which, of course, is not there. He’s throwing himself against this light, hoping he can some- how knock down these walls that keep pushing in on him. I had to trust my instincts, fling myself against it because that’s what Willy is doing. There’s no way to intellectually prepare this part. It was two or three weeks into rehearsal before I realized that was just what I had to do. With Willy, I was operating instinctually, not intellectually. With Hickey, I always knew I had to start here and get to there. Willy would be in one place in one moment, then suddenly shift to another place and time and mood. (As irony and the luck of the Irish would have it, an Iceman will come to Broadway shortly, starring Kevin Spacey ,meaning Willy and Hickey may wind up arm wrestling for the Tony as if it were some Salesman of the Year plaque.) “Salesman,” says Dennehy, “was harder than Hickey, for technical reasons and reasons of character. There was talk of this Iceman coming to Broadway in fact, but it was instead rerouted to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, requiring maybe even more chutzpah. It, too, is big - a gregarious, glad-handing disguise that has, in the past, masked a homicidal salesman as effectively as it now masks a suicidal one: Hickey in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, an equally haunted portrait, which Dennehy and director Falls placed in the Goodman gallery (between their Galileo and their Touch of the Poet). The easy, seductive smile of the salesman comes naturally to Dennehy. It’s a good snug fit, and Willy falls that much harder. If, in this era of the Home Shopping Channel, the already tragically out-of touch Loman looms a little like a dinosaur lumbering around in a land that time forgot, then Dennehy is just the behemoth for the job - a massive male presence who seems to be shoehorned into this persona of the failed Little Man. Cobb was the first in the long line of Lomans, and Brian Dennehy is the latest, arriving at the Eugene O’Neill in a lavishly praised production that Robert Falls directed at the Goodman in Chicago. Willy’s plight - believing in the American dream and chasing it blindly, only to be betrayed by it - has a timeless resonance that profits from the retelling. But in second place, screeching one stop ahead of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, was Miller’s uniquely American tragedy of a burned-out drummer at the end of his road. Willy Loman hit Broadway 50 years ago this month and has lived in legend ever since, but it wasn’t until last fall that Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman laid a legitimate claim to being The Great American Play: Britain’s Royal National Theatre polled 800 theatre professionals to determine the century’s most important English-speaking play the winner was Waiting for Godot by Ireland’s Samuel Beckett. Elizabeth Franz and Brian Dennehy in the current Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman.
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