The actor (“Caroline, or Change”) also has the distinction of delivering her lines with crystal clarity, a professional virtue that some of the other players occasionally neglect. Clarke’s brilliant performance, which finds astonishing character nuances in this long-suffering but often underplayed wife-figure. Linda Loman is a character who can fade into the woodwork, just waiting for her great defining moment at the end of the play when she declares that “attention must be paid” to her success-driven husband. It’s a gesture easy to miss, but in one startling moment, he physically shoves his wife when she tries to reason with him. Pierce goes so far as to make Willy so obsessed with his distorted values that he even seems capable of violence, something you don’t see in most contemporary performances, which invariably stress the pathos of his delusional worship of success. Under the careful direction of Miranda Cromwell, Pierce sensitively scrutinizes this deluded man’s foolish worship of the American Dream, which he narrowly interprets as material success. Pierce portrays Willy as a hero for both his time and ours - a complex human being with grave character flaws, but “a good man” for all that. In the postwar America they knew in 1948, Miller’s protagonist seemed almost anti-American.īut as this production from the Young Vic Theatre in London reminds us, Arthur Miller’s 1949 drama packs a mighty punch. It’s worth remembering that back when Arthur Miller’s now-celebrated American tragedy originally opened on Broadway, many people were unsettled by the floundering character of Willy. And who knows what other, future interpreters might find in the character.
He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.There’s no doubt that casting a Black actor as Willy Loman (for the first time on Broadway, no less) adds a deeper dimension to this monumental role. Miller was granted with the 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His latest book is On Politics and the Art of Acting. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season, and Mr. More recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), and the plays The Ride Down Mt. He has also written two novels, Focus (1945), and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977), three books of photographs by his wife, Inge Morath. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1963), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and The American Clock. Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan.
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