Death of a Salesman, BAM Fisher, New York — a stylised mindscape

Arthur Miller’s most celebrated play portrays the “American Dream” as being just that: a dream. After a lifetime of believing that hard work and good cheer are all you need to succeed, an ageing Willy Loman abruptly wakes up to the reality that he is as disposable as an old toaster.

That sense of ruptured fantasy and delusion sits at the heart of Rubén Polendo’s new staging, which transforms the earthy world of late-1940s Brooklyn into a stylised mindscape where all that is solid melts into air. The Loman family here moves around a dimly lit and mostly empty stage like ghosts at their own wake.

Standing in for the other characters are puppeteers wielding a battered refrigerator door, a fan or a lighting fixture — the same consumer durables that both symbolise Willy’s dreams of prosperity and drain his bank account. The accompanying distorted voiceover makes Miller’s dialogue itself sound harsh and mechanical. The play’s central theme of man’s commodification is thereby summed up in a bold yet simple directorial innovation, which also gives stark visual form to Willy’s crippling isolation.

More puzzling is the representation of Willy’s youngest son Happy as a large punch-bag held by an actor dressed from head to toe in a black ninja costume, though Denis Butkus does succeed in conveying the character’s snivelling egotism. For ultimately it is Happy and his gormless brother Biff (Corey Sullivan) who deliver the knockout blow, abandoning their freshly sacked father at a Manhattan steakhouse in pursuit of some bubbleheaded dames.

And yet Justin Nestor’s portrayal of Willy is so abject and pathetic that we do not feel sympathy for the broken-down salesman so much as fear for ourselves. The aura of humbled nobility associated with classical tragedy has disappeared here. What remains is the overwhelming sense that failure and ruin lurk just around everybody’s corner. The masks intermittently worn by Willy and his wife Linda (Kayla Asbell) further mark them out as ciphers of everyday doom and alienation. By stressing that universal message of despair, Polendo and his troupe breathe new life into Death of a Salesman.

To July 23, theatermitu.org