When the director Joe Mantello began working on his new production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” now in previews on Broadway, he did the obvious: He read the script.
The play’s published text, taught in schools as a pillar of American theater and a tragedy of the American dream, was full of stage directions and descriptions of the set that, Mantello said in an interview, kept cluttering his mind. So he asked the Miller estate whether there was a version stripped of all that.
He was given a draft script from 1948, the year before the play’s premiere. Typewritten, with edits in Miller’s own hand, it is a fascinating glimpse into his thinking. (One line, in which Willy Loman complains about the cheese Linda bought, was changed from “Why are you always contradicting me?” to “Why am I always being contradicted?,” turning a marital gripe into an existential cry.) Mantello found inspiration immediately.
“Sometimes it’s just a little clue that lodges itself in your brain,” he said. The draft lists young versions of the Loman brothers, Biff and Happy; Elia Kazan’s 1949 production set a precedent for having the older actors playing the brothers transform into their teenage selves. Having four performers instead of two could allow for a more natural, maybe even powerful simultaneity of their characters’ glowing potential and grim reality at different ages. Something else that struck Mantello was how impressionistic the descriptions of the set were compared with the realism of Jo Mielziner’s original designs (which were used in Mike Nichols’s nostalgic 2012 revival with Philip Seymour Hoffman).
Mantello’s ideas coalesced into a largely spare and purgatorial concept that, in arguing for yet another “Salesman” on Broadway, may distinguish itself by drawing on Miller’s original intentions. “After all the productions there have been,” said Nathan Lane, who is starring as Willy, “the only way to go was to do something radical.”
Below are three discoveries from the draft.
The Loman Brothers
The earlier script listed younger versions of Biff, a handsome star athlete bound for a future of aimlessness, and Happy, delusional and perennially in his brother’s shadow. And they appear in what Miller called concurrences, intrusions of the past into the present.
In Mantello’s production, the older pair, played by Christopher Abbott (Biff) and Ben Ahlers (Happy), are smoothly replaced by their teenage selves (Joaquin Consuelos as Biff and Jake Termine as Happy) during Willy’s dreamy reminiscences. Sometimes they are onstage at the same time, seeing one another across the years.
“Any play where you have someone playing a younger version of themselves, or just playing younger, always takes a few minutes of adjustment,” Abbott said. Having the four actors share the roles, he added, “makes it a little bit more cinematic.” It can help the audience as well as the actors, like Consuelos, who said that this production’s handling of the boys has made him “understand the play a lot better.”
Certain moments land differently with a young actor onstage, such as when the teenage Biff walks in on his father with another woman in a hotel room. And the audience can alternate between seeing the boyish Happy, desperate for some of the attention his brother gets and trying to show Willy his weight loss, and his sexier but no more flourishing adulthood.
Termine said that he can look at Ahlers’s performance and, in his scenes, “lay this groundwork for the trajectory from younger to older.” For his part, Ahlers said, “Having another artist bring in their own choices and impulses is very fruitful, because it allows me something to collide with and learn from.”
‘Attention Must Be Paid’
It’s one of the most famous lines in American theater, and it almost didn’t survive to opening night. “Attention must be paid,” Linda says to her sons, scolding them for their dismissive treatment of Willy, a “great man” to whom something terrible has happened.
The line comes in the middle of a long scene, and for whatever reason Miller felt compelled to put a big X over the entire page that contains it. Then he must have had a change of heart: In the left margin, he wrote the word “stet” twice in all caps, indicating that the excisions should be restored.
Laurie Metcalf, who is playing Linda, described her role as the same with or without that famous sentence. “Honestly,” she said, “if I was to go through all of my lines in the play, I never would have picked that to be the most iconic one.”
But it became iconic, a beacon for navigating the common-man tragedy of Willy Loman, tended to by Lindas over the decades. Metcalf, though, had never seen or read “Death of a Salesman” before this production. It’s a distance she maintains with all major roles she knows she wants to play, she said, no different from Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (which she got to star in briefly before the coronavirus pandemic).
“Any great performance,” she said, “is going to get stuck in my head.” So she approached this revival unburdened by the play’s history and the fame of any one line.
“It is as important as all the lines around it, and all the lines everybody has in the whole show,” she said. “They’re all my babies.”
Willy’s Light
Mantello’s production takes place in a cavernous industrial garage. There is no Loman house, and different settings are indicated with little more than a few pieces of metal furniture. Scenes in the present are bathed in a cold white light, while those of the past most often have a golden, nearly sepia-toned glow.
“I was intrigued, reading the script, that there wasn’t a description of a literal house,” Mantello said, “that what it appears Miller imagined was all created in light.”
The draft script begins with the direction for “a pinpoint traveling spotlight” that Willy steps into. As an image it’s lonely, even more so in the desolation of Mantello’s revival. And it tasks Lane with holding that expanse while taking up one of the most demanding roles of the past century.
Lane, 70, first saw “Salesman” on television as a 10-year-old, and he and Mantello had been talking about doing the play together since they premiered Terrence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!” three decades ago. Now that the time has come, Lane said, “I have more deeply ingrained feelings about this play than I ever realized.”
He feels like a “helicopter mom” when it comes to the play’s text, he said, and he has been surprised by how emotional it still makes him. (One line that he can’t think about without crying is Linda’s description of Willy as “only a little boat looking for a harbor.”)
So Lane has found himself, he said, in the same trap that Metcalf said she actively avoids, of being haunted by the ghosts of past productions. Mantello, Lane said, “did everything short of shock treatment to get me where he wanted me to go.” But the experience of being exposed on the stage, under the changing lights, has been exhilarating, he added.
“Then it’s frustrating, and then it’s confounding,” Lane said. “This is a play you’ll never get to the bottom of. We’ll still be figuring things out on the day we close.”
Joshua Barone is an editor for The Times covering classical music and dance. He also writes criticism about classical music and opera.
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