BWW Reviews: Attention Must Be Paid to DEATH OF A SALESMAN at EPAC

Arthur Miller's 1949 classic play, DEATH OF A SALESMAN, is a powerful and potentially infuriatingly complicated work. It's tempting to read many things into the life and death of Willy Loman, many of which Miller intended, and many others of which are reflections of the individual audience member's (or reader's) life. That the story of an older, tired, traveling salesman, his difficulties with his family and his employer, and his boundless hope has continued to rivet audiences (there have been any number of Broadway revivals, featuring such luminaries as Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman) since it first opened at the Morosco Theatre is a testament to just how strongly its themes resonate with audiences, as well as to how well it is written.

Michael Swanson's production of Miller at Ephrata Performing Arts Center is free of much of the superfluity that often plagues regional and amateur performances of the show, in a nicely spare production that keeps its focus where it needs to be. Even the set is not minimalist, but aimed at maintaining a period and a feeling without overemphasizing anything that could distract from the cast. This writer has a particular affection for Jordan Janota's set design - what is often depicted as a cityscape in the background, per Miller's thoughts, is illustrated here with a series of doors suspended at different heights behind the actors, in the darkness. While it certainly evokes a cityscape as well as anything does, anyone of a certain age with enough media exposure will certainly also think of Rod Serling and the opening to his "The Twilight Zone" series, which often expressed and addressed many of the same themes as Miller did, with a more esoteric twist to the story lines. It's a neatly-done evocation, whether intended or not, and it also speaks to the choices that every character in the play has made and continues to make throughout the story.

John Kleimo is a Willy Loman to whom attention should indeed be paid - from the moment he steps on stage, it is evident that he is indeed Loman. The weight of his sample cases can be felt by anyone looking at him; the weight he carries on his back is equally palpable. His body, not just his voice and face, speaks to Loman's concerns and fears throughout, and he communicates with his audience viscerally as well as with words. He's a fine performer as it is, but this is one of his best performances. Elizabeth Pattey is a revelation as his wife Linda - another of the area's excellent actors, she's here every inch a worried, harried, world-weary housewife and mother who's frequently mothering her declining husband as well as still mothering her adult, less than fully responsible, sons. She and Willy are fish out of water, Willy having boxed himself years before into sales as a career while rejecting the very things he seems most to have enjoyed and to have wanted. That's why his decline is unlike his role model's (the 84-year-old salesman he met on the road as a young man), because his icon was doing what he loved most, while Willy is aping him rather than being the man he was intended to be, and why Miller's play is so successful as an indictment of American careerism.

Josh Kirwin is, not surprisingly, a wonderful Biff; the conflicted ex-football player son is a perfect fit for his talents. He is the secret-keeper of the show, the only one who knows why he never became the success his father might have become himself. Kevin Fennell plays his brother, Hap, extremely well in what's a somewhat thankless part, that of the less than hardworking not-quite successful womanizer. Willy's death, which he is convinced will help his son Biff, instead becomes Hap's inspiration to pull himself together. Bob Breen plays Biff's school friend Bernard, who's become a very successful attorney, every bit as well as Fennell plays Hap when he's playing the adult Bernard, though his depiction of Bernard in school feels several years younger than it might.

If only the music were as evocative as the sets and the cast; for some reason, the music, which Miller felt important during the show, felt as well-chosen as the cast. Rather than evoking mood and feeling, it feels slightly intrusive on the events on stage, which are designed to capture the sense that the audience is participating in intimate family dynamics.

Family dynamics. Love, abandonment and fear of abandonment. Aging. Work. Depession. Why one person is a success and another a failure in adulthood despite their appearances in childhood. Those aren't contemporary problems, but timeless ones, just as DEATH OF A SALESMAN itself plays with time on stage, cutting in and out of Willy Loman's past and the choices he failed to make. This is a lovely, spare production of the show that captures that universality of theme while being firmly rooted in its time. It's very much worth attention being paid.

At Ephrata Performing Arts Center through September 20. For tickets and information call 717-733-7966 or visit EphrataPerformingArtsCenter.com.

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