It’s frequently argued that the play and, more specifically, Willy have lingered in the popular imagination due to the universality of the character’s common-man plight, a contention put to the test, and mostly affirmed, in its current London-to-Broadway revival that includes Black actors portraying the Loman family. That’s the stark paradox Arthur Miller explores in his classic 1949 tragedy Death of a Salesman through the now archetypal figure of Willy Loman, a past-his-prime patriarch whose invasively halcyon memories are buffers against the realization that a lifetime of hard work and positive thinking, what he considered to be the unassailable twin pillars of upward mobility, have betrayed him. If nothing else, the American Dream guarantees the right to hope, which is often a crushing privilege.
Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman in a scene from Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” at the Hudson Theatre (Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
