Jewish take on Arthur Miller classic succeeds brilliantly

Corey Fischer stands well over 6 feet tall, so it's hard to picture him as a small crumpled man at the end of his rope. Yet great actors regularly pull off the impossible — as do Fischer and his fellow cast members in Traveling Jewish Theatre's astounding new production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman."

The play runs through April 29 at Theater Artaud in San Francisco, then travels to various Bay Area theaters through June 10.

Though one of the most frequently performed American plays, Miller's 1949 masterpiece never fails to affect audiences through its timeless human emotion and galloping arc of tragedy.

The surprises in any production come not in divining the plot but in discovering new ways to stage the searing dreamscape that is "Death of a Salesman."

That job fell to director Aaron Davidman, who turned the cavernous Theater Artaud into the dingy Brooklyn home of Willy Loman and his cataclysmically dysfunctional family. Davidman gambled on spare but inventive stagecraft, and won.

Since this is Traveling Jewish Theatre, Davidman sought to invest the play with as much inherent Jewishness as could be gleaned from Miller's text. Thankfully, he resisted the temptation to overdo it. Other than the stark symbolism of mourners wearing kippahs in the final requiem, most of the Jewishness comes in Willy and wife Linda's Old World body language and Yiddish inflections. It's one part Edith Bunker, two parts Thomashefsky. But it works.

The story takes place over a couple of days, as Willy and Linda welcome home their ne'er-do-well sons, Biff and Happy. But all is not well. The once-promising Biff has become an aimless drifter, Happy a self-centered bounder. At 63, his career as a traveling salesman becoming road kill, Willy is losing it. His mind has begun to slip, his lifelong illusions slipping away with it.

Linda alone has a sense of balance, trying to keep her husband back from the abyss as her sons push their father closer to it. The central drama of "Salesman" is in the family's frantic effort to reinflate Willy's rapidly deflating world.

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.

But major props go to Fischer. For a character with one foot in the grave, Willy does a lot of shouting and railing. Playing him requires great physicality, which Fischer delivers.

Midway through Act One on opening night, Fischer started to lose his voice, and for the duration, he delivered many lines in a hoarse stage whisper. This could have spelled disaster, but Fischer went with it, converting his overtaxed vocal cords into one more sign of Willy's loosened grip on reality.

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.




Traveling Jewish Theater's "Death of a Salesman" plays 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays, through April 29 at Artaud Theater, 470 Florida St., S.F.; May 3-20 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View; May 24-June 10 at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., Berkeley. Tickets: $14-$44. Information: (415) 522-0786 or online at atjt.com.