The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Feb. 21, 1949

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.

What materially shrinks the play itself is the actual writing, the inadequate artistry. By never flinching before his story, by slowly, relentlessly lugging it forward, Miller gets from it a full human effect. And inside Jo Mielziner’s usefully lean set, everything moves around easily between past and present, dream world and reality. But the idea of the play is everywhere more moving than the play itself. Death of a Salesman too often circles round & round where it should soar, or swoop; it contains more illustrative scenes than a true artist would need, more explicit statements than he would countenance. Most crucially of all, Death of a Salesman—whose distinction it is to be less an indictment than an elegy—is written as solid, sometimes stolid, prose. To its credit, it has almost no fake poetry; but it has no real poetry either.

That it does have dramatic sharpness is due to a very well-handled production. Sound performers—Lee J. Cobb as Willy, Mildred Dunnock as his wife, Arthur Kennedy as his older son, Howard Smith as his friend—play well together; and a brilliant director, Elia Kazan, gives the whole thing edge and shape. Thanks to Kazan, a deeply human story catches the special resonance of the stage.

Now a solid front-ranker among young U.S. playwrights, Arthur Miller took last week’s success with caution. When a friend said that he had “arrived,” Miller protested: “You never arrive, really. There’s always the next one. . . Anybody in this business who thinks he’s an expert is kidding himself.”

A lanky, relaxed man with a gaunt Lincolnesque face, Playwright Miller, son of a coat manufacturer, played high-school football in Brooklyn, worked as shipping clerk, truck driver and dishwasher to raise his tuition at the University of Michigan. There he met Classmate Mary Slattery. They were married in 1940 and have two children.

“I’m interested in tragedy,” says Miller. “I want to discover the ordinary man in the extreme of crisis.” To keep up with the ordinary man, to store up “a usable past” and to avoid the “inbreeding, hyper-sophistication and emotional anemia” that beset successful writers, Miller still likes to take such occasional jobs of manual labor as steam fitting in a shipyard. His last job (1947) was putting together wooden slats for beer cases in a Brooklyn box factory.

His first major success came in 1945 with Focus, an angry novel about antiSemitism, which sold 90,000 copies. He wrote it on the rebound from his first Broadway play, a flop called The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944). He had tried Hollywood briefly (“like swimming in a sea of gumdrops”) and for three years wrote for radio (“like playing a scene in a dark closet”).

Then he decided to try just once more in the precarious theater (“it’s a sort of floating crap game”). For two years, off & on, he labored over a script; the result, All My Sons, won the Drama Critics’ Award in 1947. He tapped a suddenly booming bank account to buy such simple luxuries as a two-family Brooklyn brownstone house and the materials for a one-room Connecticut cottage, which he built himself.

Last spring, he wrote Death of a Salesman in a six-week spurt; it had been stewing in his head for ten years. The script inspired such enthusiasm in its producers and Director Kazan that most of its 80 investors put up the backing without reading it. Some disliked the title and demanded a new one with box office lure, but Miller held out for his own.

Mistrusting Hollywood, he and the producers are considering doing an independent film version, directed by cinema-wise Elia Kazan (Gentleman’s Agreement, Boomerang). Other Miller projects: two new plays, one a “pathetic comedy” about an Italian worker in Brooklyn’s Red Hook section, and a novel set on the Brooklyn waterfront.

My Name Is Aquilon (adapted from the French of Jean Pierre Aumont by Philip Barry; produced by the Theatre Guild) tells of a cocky, penniless young Parisian (Jean Pierre Aumont) with a romantic need, and a remunerative knack, for telling lies. He lands a job with a high-toned black marketeer and in no time arouses love or lust in all the boss’s womenfolk—wife (Arlene Francis), daughter (Lilli Palmer), secretary (Doe Avedon). He himself goes for the daughter and takes all evening at it.

Full of fine tall tales, Aquilon is itself a sadly skinny one. Playwright Aumont obviously wrote it as a gift for Actor Aumont. Adapter Barry did nothing to take it away. While Aumont is sloshing his emphatic charm all over the stage, the script is dousing everything with tedious chatter. Consoling but not countervailing is the quieter charm of Cinemactress Palmer.