Willy Loman (Rich Foucheux) is our nation’s shambling, shuffle-gaited King Lear. The defeated hero of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece, “Death of a Salesman,” has nearly exhausted the positive patter that has sustained him for decades. Without a territory, without a spiel, Willy is a husk of a man; wandering in exile, lost in dreams and wasted potential.
Everything in Willy Loman’s life has been just talk. His career, his home life, his inflated hopes for his adult son Biff (Jeremy S. Holm), a tarnished prodigy who has become rootless and a thief.
When Willy returns home after a disappointing sales trip, his can-do spin and his belief in the American dream cannot save him from facing the pockmarked truth about himself and his family.
Mr. Foucheux embodies the tragic aspects of Willy Loman in a towering performance that is notable for its sheer size and guts. Not the stooped, pathetic old man of many portrayals, his expansive and pugilistic Willy is unafraid to take up space, filling a room to an almost uncomfortable level with his rhetoric and his angry rants.
When he pokes out his stomach, he’s establishing his turf. Mr. Foucheux also doesn’t shy away from his character’s Jewishness, the cadence of his speech containing traces of the cantor.
His performance (although the actor’s tendency to kick a line at the top of each scene was a bit troubling on opening night) is one of the heartrending pleasures of Arena Stage’s revival of “Death of a Salesman,” vigorously directed by Timothy Bond.
Two other revelatory portrayals include Nancy Robinette as Willy’s helpmate wife, Linda, as watchfully aware and resourceful as she is caring. “Attention must be paid,” she admonishes her sons about their worn-down father. But it is Linda who is always paying attention, always on guard, always keeping a tally — whether it’s for Willy’s commissions or Biff’s transgressions.
As Biff, Mr. Holm’s staggering, Stanley Kowalski-like riff on the character makes him someone not just trapped in his father’s inflated ambitions for him, but someone trapped in his own brutal physicality. He’s an athlete without a game.
The tangled dreams of father and son, their intense, injured love for each other and the family’s legacy of lies and aggrieved loyalty imbue “Death of a Salesman” with weary transcendence. At once, both a memory play and a look at the hard end of one man’s undistinguished life, “Death” reflects Willy’s confusion as he drifts between current events and past feelings of happiness and guilt.
The set, evenly divided between the careworn Loman home and a subjective backyard space, reveals the divisions in Willy’s mind. Humiliating scenes of Willy being fired melt into elegantly stylized memories of his elder brother Ben (J. Fred Shiffman, a dapper death figure), an adventurer who made it big in African diamonds and Alaskan oil.
A conversation with Linda about careless driving veers into chummy reminiscences of sons Biff and Happy (Tim Getman, over-the-top as a man desperate to scramble out from under his brother’s shadow) simonizing the old Chevy and schmoozing the girls.
This hallucinatory, eerie mingling of past and present makes “Death” more than just a portrait of a deluded nobody. It gives the play poetry and turns the character of Willy Loman into the most heartbreaking kind of American antihero — someone who is powerfully ignored. He’s talking the talk, but nobody cares to listen.
***
WHAT: “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller
WHERE: Arena Stage in Crystal City, 1800 S. Bell St., Arlington
WHEN: Running in repertory with “A View From a Bridge.” Through May 18.
TICKETS: $47-$66
PHONE: 202/488-3300
WEB SITE: www.arenastage.org
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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