Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Responses to "Salesman"

Death of a Salesman opened Sunday, April 8 to an audience of 200+ at the Project Artaud Theatre. We're about to begin our second week in Mountain View. Here’s an updated mix of responses from audience members and critics. Please add your comments after you see the play. For tickets, call (415) 522-0786 or go to www.atjt.com


From: audience member Mark Schlesinger

I wanted to let both of you know how much we enjoyed ATJT’s production of Death of a Salesman. I’ve seen the play a few times over the years (including the production starring Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich on Broadway) but none of them, in my opinion, came close to this version. Please extend my thanks and congratulations to Aaron, as well as to Corey Fischer, Jerri Lynn Cohen, Michael Navarra, John Sousa and the rest of the excellent cast for providing such a wonderful, poignant, and thought-provoking experience. Needless to say, it made Christine and me very proud to be supporters of ATJT.

From www.goldstarevents.com:

Goldstar gives TJT's production of "Death of a Salesman," its "Roar of the Crowd award." Here's a sampling of what their patrons have said: Marc Mayer raves, "Fantastically acted and directed. A real treat. Poignant, insightful, polemical, masterful, and overarchingly enjoyable." Debora Simcovich calls this production "first-rate theatre." Maxine Einhorn lauds, "Brilliant performances. I loved it." Judith Guerriero tells us, "Incredible acting, a deep and wonderful rendering of this classic Miller play." Steven Foerder calls Death of a Salesman "A very powerful and enjoyable tour de force by all cast members." Kenneth Hempel simply states, "Very worthwhile." And finally, Ira Okun says the play "still has important meaning for this generation."

From Sam Hurwitt’s review in the East Bay Express www.eastbayexpress.com/2007-04-11/culture/pay-attention/

Most astonishing is the performance of TJT cofounder Corey Fischer as Willy Loman. It's all there in his body, all the stubborn pride and insistent insecurities, his tall frame slumped and getting only more painfully hunched in on itself as the play goes on. You can hear it in his incessant, animated ramblings, whether talking to people actually in the room or those in his head. Seemingly without taking a breath, he slides from sputtering anger to swellings of garrulous pride that crumple as easily as they come. When he stoops to pick up his boss' lighter, you can hear the air going out of not just him, but the entire room.

Willy's moments of good cheer increasingly become more heartrending than those of overt bitterness or desperation. There's a haunting, childlike innocence in the way he tells his neighbor, "Charley, you're the only friend I got. Isn't that a remarkable thing?" It hits harder than if Willy weren't trying so hard to put the best face on it. As he shuffles off with his shoulders hunched high and his arms gesticulating, it's hard not to get a little teary. Somehow it's so much worse when he smiles.

Also absolutely devastating is son Biff's big face-off against a father with whom he is always at odds. Michael Navarra gives Biff's resentment and outsize physicality just the right amount of underlying solicitude, guilt, and longing for approval. John Sousa is a wonderfully twitchy bundle of nerves, lusts, and aspirations as younger son Happy; the brothers are all manic energy and starry-eyed adulation as boys whenever Willy's mind drifts into the past.

Robert Avila writing in the SF Bay Guardian

When Arthur Miller — through the character of Linda Loman (Jeri Lynn Cohen), model of the devoted, long-suffering wife and mother — implores the audience to notice the "terrible thing" happening to her husband, Willy, the United States was in the throes of an unprecedented postwar boom. Miller's observation of the tragic dimensions of a nation of small and hollow men and women, of dreamers, of sellers fooled by their own pitches, came as a revelation. Nearly 60 downwardly mobile years on, the Traveling Jewish Theater's not-to-be-missed staging brings fresh attention and fine skill to the Jewish inflection in Miller's American story, whose sheer ordinariness — its pitiful material distress, class shame, and wrenchingly anonymous sadness — still burns with indignation and rebuke. Indeed, for all its period charm (with Project Artaud's capacious stage, under Jim Cave's mood-laden lighting, turned into a blend of home and highway by scenic designer Giulio Cesare Perrone), the desperation feels utterly contemporary. TJT cofounder Corey Fischer leads director Aaron Davidman's excellent cast with a stirring and memorable turn as Loman — a simultaneously hunched and towering figure of a man whose daydreams and memories (augmented here by composer-cellist Jessica Ivry's wistful score) invade the action, dramatically dissolving the broken line between fiction and reality attendant on the American dream and an unraveling ego.

From Evan Specter, long-time TJT audience/community member

Death of Salesman is for me quintessential TJT: an economy- a bare quorum of props and set, allowing the lightscape and soundscape (egad, a live cellist!?) to amplify the effect of the ensemble’s deep rapport with each other and the material. Each production element selflessly serves its purpose, just as each scene of the script takes Willy inexorably towards his complete dissolution, and us with him.

I am a father and a son and the pangs radiated from onstage of inadequacy and expectation resonate deeply without manipulation. And yet the play doesn’t make it easy to pass judgment on Biff or Willy – and so it keeps me on the edge of my seat, unable to simply condemn or redeem myself along with them. Somehow by not making an obvious parable, it touches more deeply.

On a subtler level, in the depiction of a man’s exquisite disintegration, I see an aspect of my own scattered consciousness pretty fairly represented. For example, in the scene with present-day Bernard, “the anemic”, Willy progresses from a puffing, blustery "Biff is working on something really big” to an entreating ask about the secret to success, and then back to a bluster/fluster about what happened in Boston, I puff and fluster right along with him… and the intensity is building; the rifts in Willy’s coherence are spreading.

The mercurial flip-flops to me feel so familiar and real somehow- and on some level isn’t that how we all are- saying one thing one moment and contradicting it the next in deed or word... so for me it's not just a story of a person's dissolution but it describes a part of us that clings to a way of looking at things, that makes pronouncements about reality but secretly doubts them, that overwrites personal history so many times we don't know what really happened anymore.

I am reminded of my aging grandmother in Palm Beach, alone and bitter with a memory that is giving way to fantasy, and a growing paranoia and litany of regrets. She is so looking forward to my visit, and yet when I arrive she will ask when will I be coming again? Will I be kind as Linda or cruel as Hap? And I observe in my own mind certain voices and characters summoned up by the play: a business venture untaken, imaginings about successful acquaintances, a hidden hosebib of resignation. Great theater does this to me: casts a penetrating light on present relationships and leaves haunting cello tones echoing in my mind.

"Jewish take on Arthur Miller classic succeeds brilliantly"
by dan pine, in J. the Jewish Weekly
(click here for full review)

Fischer, as Willy, contorts himself into a shuffling arthritic, bone weary and failing fast. Yet Willy is capable of a febrile imperiousness that drives his wife and kids nuts. Though his character never heard of “bipolar disease,” Fischer brilliantly navigates Willy’s violent mood swings.

Michael Navarra and John Sousa as Biff and Happy are marvelous together, conveying genuine brotherly love corrupted by Willy’s patriarchal smothering. The Loman brothers’ doomed-to-fail “big deal” gives Willy the cruelest of false hopes, and both actors milk their characters’ ambivalence about it.

Jeri Lynn Cohen balances Linda’s inborn grace with perpetual fear of knocking over her husband’s widening gyre. Miller gives Linda some of the play’s most iconic lines, but Cohen wisely plays them straight. Her performance is a model of tissue-level commitment to a role.

The supporting cast is uniformly superb, especially Louis Parnell, who mines maximum humor out of Willy’s neighbor, Charley, and Meghan Doyle as Willy’s sometime mistress, the ditz who unwittingly triggers the Loman family’s implosion.

Much praise also goes to Jessica Ivry, whose live musical accompaniment, scored for solo cello, provides heartbreakingly apt counterpoint to the drama. Though Miller’s original stage directions called for flute, it’s hard to imagine anything more evocative than Ivry’s ominous pizzicato as Willy’s world crumbles.

Davidman’s staging augments Miller’s dialogue, especially with such touches as the upright, bird’s-eye-view bed (doubling as the Loman marriage bed and Willy’s out-of-town den of sin). Parading the entire cast, ghostlike, during some of Willy’s hallucinations, Davidman turns “Salesman” into ballet. And having his actors talk over each other in some scenes, he mimics the kind of repartee heard in a Howard Hawks film noir thriller. It, too, works beautifully.

At age 33, Arthur Miller wrote “Salesman” in a short burst of Promethean inspiration. Any production, no matter how modest, will reflect some of that greatness. With Traveling Jewish Theatre’s take, Miller’s fiery spirit has never burned brighter.

Rob Hurwitt writing in the SF Chronicle:
click for full review

Jeri Lynn Cohen is a vital Linda, forcefully, affectingly maintaining the importance and dignity of her husband against the ridicule and hostility of their sons and others. A potent, angry Michael Navarra and amoral John Sousa add riveting depth to the sons' struggles with their father's fatal commitment to a false American dream.

Sharp performances by Zac Jaffee, Meghan Doyle, Julian López-Morillas, Louis Parnell, Danny Webber and Juliet Strong help ground the drama.

Chloe Veltman in the SF Weekly:

One of the most powerful aspects of Davidman's staging is his creation of a psychic space on stage. Crisp lighting changes, from white, denoting "reality," to the warm orange of Willy's fantasy life, draw an efficient line between the play's two states. Jessica Ivry's live cello music, heard every time the action slips into Willy's over-ripe imagination, fluidly accentuates the divide. The barren stage, scattered with a few random pieces of furniture like wallflowers at a cocktail party and scarred with the white markings of the open road, suggests isolation and loneliness. In short, we feel like we are looking at the insides of Willy's head.

And what a head it is. As portrayed by Fischer, Willy is a man clutching desperately to his last vestiges of reason. Rattling around the stage with his beat-up valises, alternately bursting with aggressive ebullience and crippled despair, this Willy is a spluttering light bulb about to spend its fuse. Taking his cues from Ivry's cello, Fischer gives an extremely physical performance. When Ivry plays a sprightly pizzicato, Fischer lightens up. His long frame extends and his whole body seems to fill with air. But when the cello changes its tune to the plodding shuffle of a worn old man, so Fischer's body appears to collapse on itself. The muscles on his face tighten. He walks with an uneven, exhausted gait. The scenes between Willy and his eldest son, Biff (Michael Navarra), bring the actor's physical command of his character to the fore. The greater Biff's frustration grows, the more contorted Willy's body becomes. The full horror and pathos of Miller's tragedy can be seen in the interactions between these two characters.