Though Pierce devastatingly pulls Willy apart in front of our eyes until all that’s left is his sense of failure, it’s Clarke who gives Willy’s downfall its saddest dimension, convincing the audience, beyond any doubt, that the very-flawed Willy is loved. Clarke ( Caroline, or Change) as Linda, his long-suffering wife. The play’s West-End co-director Marianne Elliott has not made the journey across the pond with its ongoing contributors, all of whom deserve kudos for the revelatory production, especially Wendell Pierce ( Broke-ology, The Wire, Treme) as Willy and Sharon D. To be clear, the casting isn’t colorblind it’s just casting, with director Miranda Cromwell delicately drawing out a different set of lived experiences from Miller’s almost untouched words. It’s frequently argued that the play and, more specifically, Willy have lingered in the popular imagination due to the universality of the character’s common-man plight, a contention put to the test, and mostly affirmed, in its current London-to-Broadway revival that includes Black actors portraying the Loman family.
That’s the stark paradox Arthur Miller explores in his classic 1949 tragedy Death of a Salesman through the now archetypal figure of Willy Loman, a past-his-prime patriarch whose invasively halcyon memories are buffers against the realization that a lifetime of hard work and positive thinking, what he considered to be the unassailable twin pillars of upward mobility, have betrayed him. If nothing else, the American Dream guarantees the right to hope, which is often a crushing privilege. Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman in a scene from Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” at the Hudson Theatre (Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
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