'Salesman' Can't Get Its Foot in the Door

Arena's Revival Lacks Fresh Insight

The cusp of an economic downturn is either the best moment or the worst to be reminded of the plight of Willy Loman, the standard-bearer for much that goes awry in the American way. Unable to pay his bills, on the verge of being fired, at odds with his dissolute sons and unfaithful to his saintly wife, Willy is broke and broken, a man in the grips of, one might say, a recession of the soul.

Living through a hard time, unfortunately, is experienced too literally in Arena Stage's lackluster revival of "Death of a Salesman." For all of its efforts to inject a breathless sense of angry free fall in the Loman household -- there is a whole lot of windy sanctimony blowing through this nervous Brooklyn kitchen -- Timothy Bond's production lumbers along with few interludes of bona fide poignancy or fresh insight. The play, as a result, becomes almost too much a reflection of Willy: it is on this occasion old and tired.

Arena has assembled what it is calling an Arthur Miller festival, although its two-play repertory is more like a duet than a chorus. (The other offering, "A View From the Bridge," staged by Daniel Aukin with far more vitality, will be reviewed on another day.) The two productions share a corps of actors and, in the company's temporary home in Crystal City, the rudiments of a set. Each also has at its core an ordinary man of warring impulses who commits an ethical transgression and pays the ultimate price.

By virtue of its reputation as the great American tragedy, "Salesman" is the easier sell and the tougher assignment. In the pathos of Willy's deterioration, and the massing of the crushing forces that help it along, an audience should not merely gaze from the sidelines at the horror, but feel as if it's drowning, too. The play is burdened with some stagy stuff that stamps it as starchily of its time: the ethereal exchanges with Willy's pretentious role-model brother Ben (J. Fred Shiffman) are especially arch. Nevertheless, Willy's ordeal should invite shame and compassion, should set us up to be a little bit shattered and a little bit appalled.

The superior, no-nonsense actor Rick Foucheux has been cast as Willy, and while he's physically right for the part -- the baleful countenance he effects seems to cry out for the world's contempt -- the performance doesn't evoke the idea of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God that allows Willy Loman to haunt our American dreams. Foucheux's Willy is so convulsed from the start by delusion and self-loathing that we never quite believe the vanity of the man, the cautionary aspect of the character that makes him less a victim than a flawed, complexly rendered human being.

We get, in other words, too little idea of the salesman. When Willy's enabler of a wife, Linda (Nancy Robinette), demands of their sons, the lost Biff (Jeremy S. Holm) and libertine Happy (Tim Getman), that attention be paid to the sacrifices of a man like their father, the words don't quite sink in the way they might when Willy is built of more apparent contradiction.

The limited flexibility of the stage in Crystal City does not prove optimal for "Death of a Salesman." Loy Arcenas's set is suitably dingy -- the empty picture frames on the walls reinforce the idea of something cold and lifeless in the house -- but the divisions of the space are not quite adequate to the play's frequent demands for shifts in time and place. Laurie Churba Kohn's costumes reflect our collective memory of muted middle-class fashion of the late 1940s and early 1950s, though one of the getups for Willy's more successful neighbor Charley (Noble Shropshire) is too glaring of a joke.

Robinette's Linda capably embodies the forbearance of an intelligent woman who, for the sake of pity or emotional self-defense, turns a blind eye to her husband's weaknesses. It's a subtly convincing portrayal, especially in the way her Linda mollifies Foucheux's agitated, fly-off-the-handle Willy. In a scene in which Willy refuses to be pinned down about how little he has earned on his latest trip to New England, Robinette skillfully unfolds Linda's walking-on-eggshells manner of registering as little as possible.

Holm and Getman adapt to serviceable ideas of Biff and Happy as bundles of insecurity. Holm's Biff is all anxious hypersensitivity; Getman's Happy, overemphatic bluster. It is Shropshire's Charley, oddly enough, who stands out as the most effective channel in this blurry production for articulating our conflicted reactions to Willy, who lets us feel something of the power of empathy.

Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller. Directed by Timothy Bond. Set, Loy Arcenas; costumes, Laurie Churba Kohn; lighting, Nancy Schertler; composer, Michael G. Keck; fight choreographer, David S. Leong; dialect consultant, Robert Barry Fleming. With Louis Cancelmi, Naomi Jacobson, Virginia Kull, Stephen F. Schmidt. About 3 hours. In repertory through May 18 at Arena Stage Crystal City, 1800 S. Bell St., Arlington. Call 202-488-3300 or visit http://www.arenastage.org.