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Mark Lee somehow made it through middle school, high school, and college without ever reading or seeing Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s classic 1949 play. His only context before the curtain came up at the Winter Garden Theater for the Tony Award winning revival currently on Broadway was a vague sense that “it’s about capitalism” and the SNL sketch where Will Ferrell exclaims, “I drive a Dodge Stratus!” By the end of the show, he came away shaken and quaking with anticipation to talk about it with his co-host Pete Fenzel, who’s written his fair share of English papers on the topic and seen several different productions of the play.
Pete and Mark spend much of the episode comparing the current Broadway production starring Nathan Lane with a 2000 production starring Brian Dennehy in the role. Dennehy is a mountain of a man playing a mountain of a man, while Nathan Lane, who currently inhabits the role on Broadway, is compact and elastic, visibly shrinking and growing as the play slides between the broken present and the golden, half-imagined past. The 2000 production has a more naturalistic presentation, while the current one has a more surreal quality, detached from any sense of an actual home or any specific “post-war” period. A Starbucks cup, a 60’s automobile, and a Black attorney appearing before the Supreme Court all have small but significant impacts on the experience of watching this production.
In addition to production choices, Pete and Mark dive deep on the complex interplay between playwriting and psychology, the immigrant-ness of the Lomans, and the perspective of being dads while watching this show. Parenting advice is given, in terms of how not to cope with life’s challenges and pass on trauma to your children.
Correction: although the play was caught up in McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s, the McCarthy Pete was referencing in this discussion was activist writer Mary McCarthy, who criticized Arthur Miller for hiding the Loman’s Jewishness.
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