"Death of Salesman," the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning Arthur Miller classic, is brilliantly depressing. We meet the protagonist, burned-out salesman Willy Loman, when he's at the end of his rope. Willy's once semi-lucrative sales career has dried up. His wife and kids, whom he's grown sick of coming home to, are equally sick of his constant shortcomings. He dreams of better days, all the while knowing that they won't come, and reminisces about the past, even though the kind of prosperity he dreamed of was never fully within his reach. We watch Willy, who shrinks to a smaller and smaller person right before our eyes and loses his mind along with the idea of the American Dream, questioning if that ever really existed at all.
Miller's play was a smash at its original opening in 1949. The play, set in Brooklyn, was packaged as a small book and sold over 11 million copies, making it "probably the most successful modern play ever published," according to New Yorker drama critic John Lahr. The play went on to have multiple stints on Broadway, with George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman all playing Willy in various iterations. The play has been performed all over the world, including China. Other theaters have experimented with switching up the basic makeup and elements of the different characters in the play, but there has never been a Black cast on Broadway until Wendell Pierce, Sharon D. Clarke (who plays his wife Linda Loman), McKinley Belcher III and Khris Davis (sons Happy and Biff) took center stage with director Miranda Cromwell this fall.
