Joe Mantello has the inner glow of a man who has been keeping faith with himself. His attentive, quietly secure manner is everything you’d want from a director, but his composure was particularly impressive given that he was still in rehearsals for the new Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” when we met for brunch at a hotel near Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park in early March.
Arthur Miller’s masterpiece is one of those Mount Everests for American stage directors — a legacy-building challenge that invites comparisons with the all-time greats.
A two-time Tony-winning director (“Assassins,” “Take Me Out”), Mantello has a résumé so extensive that it can be startling to recall that he’s the original Broadway director of “Wicked,” the blockbuster that has allowed him to write his own ticket. There aren’t many theater directors who can pick and choose their projects without worrying about their next paycheck, but he has become the Mike Nichols of our era in terms of the breadth and consistency of his theatrical success.
Flattered but too humble to agree, Mantello acknowledged that both he and Nichols “came from performing and kind of stumbled into directing.” They also share a reputation for being canny directors of actors, understanding from their experience in the spotlight what to say to a performer and when to say it.
He doesn’t act all that often on Broadway, but when he has the results have been memorable. He earned a Tony nomination for playing Louis in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and was just as incisive in the role of Ned Weeks in the 2011 Broadway production of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart.”
His most recent foray on Broadway, playing Tom Wingfield in Sam Gold’s daring take on Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” in 2017, made me wonder if he’s particularly drawn to the work of gay playwrights. “It hasn’t been that strategic,” he said. “I think it’s just the things that have come my way. Yes, it’s definitely a subject I’m interested in, but I haven’t consciously chosen to only do those roles.”
When I said that I assumed that producers were offering him parts all the time, he dryly replied, “You would be incorrect.” He did admit that the time commitment of a Broadway run does give him pause.
“I have a place here in New York, but I really live in the desert, in Rancho Mirage,” he said. “I like to come to New York for short periods for work, but my life is really based out there these days.”
This season he’s had two productions on Broadway. In the fall, he directed Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which was just named winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play. And last month he unveiled his production of “Death of a Salesman,” perhaps the most anticipated opening in the April crush before the Tony Award eligibility cut-off date. The show received nine nominations on Tuesday, including one for Mantello’s direction.
Laurie Metcalf was in both shows, and “Salesman” is the eighth play they’ve done together on Broadway, including a production of Edward Albee‘s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that was stopped short in previews because of the COVID pandemic. Mantello, who’s originally from Rockford, Ill., said that he has been wanting to work with Metcalf since he arrived in New York in 1984, fresh out of what was then known as the North Carolina School of the Arts. He was dazzled by her in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company revival of Lanford Wilson’s “Balm in Gilead” at Circle Repertory Theatre and said she became a beacon for the kind of work he wanted to do.
Steppenwolf and Circle Rep, with their combination of theatrical fearlessness, searing intensity and rabid teamwork, helped shape Mantello’s aesthetic. And no one exemplifies this intrepid style better than Metcalf.
Mantello, who found an early home with the off-Broadway company Naked Angels, had an appreciation for what he called her “ensemble-based way of working.” What is it that Metcalf uniquely brings to a production? “She explores every crevice of a piece, looking for clues and finding things in the most unexpected places,” he said. “That’s what is so thrilling about working with her. We have a shared sensibility, but I’m always interested to see where her instincts take her because they’re quite often not where other people would go.”
He said he often searches for a play knowing that she’ll be in it. “Because she makes my job easier,” he said. “She sets the pace, as does Nathan. They show up and they’re extremely prepared. And to have that kind of leadership in a room is thrilling. At this point we have a shorthand with each other. We’re both from Illinois and we have a kind of Midwestern sensibility. We both work pretty hard and we’re no nonsense, but we also laugh at the same things. I will go anywhere to do a play with Laurie Metcalf.”
The desire to do “Salesman,” however, started with Lane, who was in Mantello’s production of Terrence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” which won the 1995 Tony Award for best play.
“I don’t know what it was, but I said to him that one day I was going to direct him in ‘Death of a Salesman,’” Mantello recalled. “Looking back on it, it makes absolutely no sense, because at the time, I didn’t even consider myself a director. Nor did I see my life going in that direction. And there was certainly nothing about him age-wise that seemed to indicate that he had a Willy Loman in him. I just had this, I guess you’d call it, a premonition or instinctual response to him.”
The conversation between them continued, and when Mantello directed Lane and Metcalf in the 2008 Broadway production of David Mamet’s “November,” she was brought into the fold. “So it has been a long gestation period,” he said.
When asked if he was planning anything radical with “Salesman,” he made clear that he wasn’t trying to impose anything on the play. “That’s not how I work,” he said.
But he has done something quite daring in choosing to use a 1948 draft of the play that he obtained from Miller’s estate. He was looking for a version of the script free of the influence of the play’s first director, Elia Kazan. Mantello wasn’t being impudent. He merely wanted to approach “Salesman” the way he would a new play.
“To go to the source script has been very interesting, because while there are references to bedrooms and the boys being upstairs, Miller doesn’t describe a naturalistic setting,” Mantello said. “He doesn’t even describe them being in a house. What he describes, really, is light and you get the feeling that it’s all happening in his head. It’s a much more liminal space, and that honestly has always been my reading of the play. That it exists in this psychological space and that, at least in this production, we’ve dispensed with the rooms and the architecture of the house.”
His leads, he said, come with contrasting backgrounds. “Laurie, assuming that one day she might play the role, has never seen a production of the play whereas Nathan has many of them,” Mantello said. “But one of the things that I like about their relationship, on-stage and off, is that they found a way to tell the story of Willy and Linda as equal partners. She doesn’t exist to serve him. What I find so moving about the requiem is that her partner is gone. Not just her husband, not just someone that she relied on to be the breadwinner, but her equal partner. You feel that sense between them, that they know each other inside and out. And so when one half of that equation is gone, it hits in a different way.”
Singling out their work ethic, Mantello extolled the way Laneand Metcalfcan be relied on to hit the ground running. “On the first day, they’re not holding a script. They’ve done the work, so they enter the space at full tilt. So already our conversations are at a certain level. They’re not afraid to make mistakes or bold choices. There is a slower, more private, more intimate way of working, but I never understand what my role is in that other than to tread water until they’re ready to do it. That’s fine. It’s just not my preferred way of working.”
Are Lane and Metcalf open to editing? “It’s very collaborative, because we’ve known each other for so long,” he said. “I think it was Mike Nichols who said the best idea wins. All I’m looking for is what is the most interesting version of this scene.”
Lane won his first two Tonys for his performances in musical comedies (“The Producers” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”). But he’s no stranger to drama, having starred in the Goodman Theatre’s acclaimed production of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” which no one would call a laugh riot. And he won another Tony for his savage portrayal of Roy M. Cohn in the Broadway revival of Tony Kushner’s two-part epic, “Angels in America.”
But his reputation as a comic standard bearer precedes him, and not everyone was immediately on board with the prospect of his Willy Loman when the revival was announced. Mantello, speaking not about Lane but about his approach to casting in general, said that tension “between your idea of an actor’s persona and a role” is not necessarily a bad thing.
He held up the example of Mary Tyler Moore in “Ordinary People.” “You would never think that America’s sweetheart would be so brilliant as this extremely chilly, withholding suburban housewife,” he said. “I’m looking at this production as if it’s a new work and we didn’t have the history of all those wonderful performances. How then do we unpack this script? That’s really been the guiding principle, not to make any assumptions.”
Mantello’s instincts proved correct once again: Lane and Metcalf were both nominated for their performances, along with Christopher Abbott, who plays Biff. Scott Rudin, who was the subject of allegations of bullying that provoked an industry reckoning on abusive workplace behavior in 2021, is a producer on the revival, which has become one of the unmissable events of the season. His return to Broadway — he produced “Little Bear Ridge Road” in the fall — has stoked controversy, and Metcalf seemed rattled when asked in a New Yorker profile about her ongoing relationship with him.
Mantello gave a much more succinct answer: “Scott has made his own statements, and I’ll let that stand. And I certainly don’t feel obligated to share any personal conversations that he and I have had regarding this. I believe in accountability and I believe in redemption. I do not expect everyone else to share that worldview.”
No stranger to working with demanding, outsize personalities, I asked Mantello what it was like to direct some of the more notably difficult greats, such as Glenda Jackson, with whom he worked on the Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” in 2018.
“I found her very invigorating and certainly challenging,” he said. “She liked to spar. All of those years in Parliament served her well. There was a sense of her interrogating me, which I felt like I needed to rise to. It wasn’t the warmest experience I’ve ever had, but looking back on it, I think she made me and the production better.”
As for Bette Midler, whom he directed in John Logan’s play “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers” on Broadway (and the Geffen Playhouse) in 2013, he said, “It was an interesting time for her because she was returning to the stage after a long absence. And not only coming back to the stage but in a one-woman-show, which is daunting.”
“She was very hard working,” he said. “She was very diligent. She was exacting. But it was always in service of finding the truth of the character. Again, a challenging presence in the room, but one that was trying to achieve the same goals that I was trying to achieve.”
I inquired about his experience on “Other Desert Cities” by Jon Robin Baitz, his former romantic partner, wondering if it was complicated to work with an ex. “He’s still my closest friend,” he said. “We transitioned into another kind of relationship, but we are still as close as we ever were.”
Of course I had to ask his opinion on the transformation of “Wicked” to the screen. “I only saw the films recently,” he said. “I wasn’t avoiding them. I just wanted to see them back to back, and a friend said let’s do that. I don’t have the experience to have an informed opinion of the filmmaking, but I thought they were really effective in telling that story in a different medium.”
Was Mantello, who directed the screen adaptations of his stage productions of”Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “The Boys in the Band” as well as the performance sections of the documentary of “The Vagina Monologues,” ever in the running to direct the movie? “I wasn’t,” he said matter of factly. “I think there was a considered decision not to make the film for at least 15 years. And film directing on that scale is not a skill set that I possess.”
When you’ve accomplished as much as Mantello has in the theater, there’s no reason to blow smoke. His self-possession isn’t an act. It emanates from a source of gratitude — gratitude for the opportunity to do meaningful work.
Before we parted, I asked if, having already won two awards, he still gets caught up in the hoopla of the Tony Awards. He shared that he actually has three Tonys, not two. I apologized for my error, but he explained that the third originally belonged to someone else.
“Around the time I was doing ‘The Normal Heart,’ I gave an interview in which I mentioned that I was obsessed with Sandy Dennis,” he said, referencing the Oscar-winning Method actor who died in 1992. “How many 10-year-old boys in the Midwest even know who Sandy Dennis is? I just loved her. She was my favorite actor at the time. As I was coming out of the stage door, there was a young man standing there with a brown paper bag. He introduced himself and said that he was sent by Bill Treusch, who represented Sandy Dennis for many years. And he told me that Bill was so moved that I mentioned her in the interview that he’d like me to have her Tony Award from ‘A Thousand Clowns.’ I sort of collapsed.”
Mantello recalled getting on the subway and not opening the bag. “I just sat there, and when I got home I opened it and there was her award,” he said. “It was the Friday before the Sunday night Tony Awards and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a sign. Win, lose, it’s not important. You’re part of a continuum. You’re part of a history, and that is what is important.’”
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