STAGE REVIEW : Theatre Center Revives ‘Death of a Salesman’

“Attention must be paid to such a person.... Pop! I’m a dime a dozen and so are you.... Nobody dast blame this man.... We’re free and clear....”

Famous lines from a great play. The challenge, 40 years after its premiere, is to make us hear them as if for the first time. Does this happen in the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s revival of “Death of a Salesman”?

Only, I think, for those who actually are hearing Arthur Miller’s lines for the first time. That will include the young people who will see “Death of a Salesman” at special student matinees, on LATC’s “Theatre as a Learning Tool” series. They may be overwhelmed by it.

Those who know the play may find Bill Bushnell’s staging less compelling. The acting is solid and the climaxes are in the right place, but there is a willed quality about the performances--the sound of actors making big emotions, rather than the sound of a family who know each other all too well.

“Death of a Salesman” is, of course, a play of big emotions. Willy Loman (Philip Baker Hall here) has sold himself to the wrong dream, but he never knows it. After living his life on the installment plan, he goes out like a big spender--a man who finally found a way to beat the system.

Meanwhile his son Biff (Christopher McDonald) is desperately struggling to find out where he belongs in this jungle of a city--if he belongs here at all. The explosion that ends Willy’s life gives him his location.

These are large, important issues--a fact that the viewer is too aware of when watching this production. Instead of our saying: “Hmm, Linda darns stockings as a way of getting back at Willy,” or “Aha, Biff isn’t going to let Willy forget about what happened in Boston,” we say: “How tragic.”

Well, Miller’s play is a tragedy, but it’s not interesting to play the Lomans simply as sincerer-than-thou victims of the system. They are also engaged in certain private wars of their own, and these supply the play with a good deal of its texture.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, for example, to look into Willy’s charge that Biff is constantly trying to “spite” him--to challenge him for control of the household? Hall plays this as another of Willy’s rationalizations: anyone can see that McDonald’s Biff wants the best for his Dad, for himself, for everybody--he just doesn’t know how to bring it about.

But wouldn’t their last-act scuffle have more danger if Biff--at least a part of Biff--did want to unseat his old man and become the new head of the family? “Death of a Salesman” allows for more psychological complexity than is felt at LATC--for a sense of complication and contradiction, a sense of the love and anger that obtains between families.

Here everybody more or less stews, more or less nobly. There are only a few moments that seem on the brink of revealing something about the Lomans that we didn’t know before.

After Willy goes downtown to meet his sons, for example, the phone rings, and Edith Fields as Linda lets it ring one more time than it needs to, as if to prove to herself that she is not at the bid and call of the world--although certainly at the bid and call of her husband and sons.

Nice: but the idea doesn’t go any place in her big scene where she denounces the boys--McDonald as Biff and Gregory Wagrowski as Happy. She is still Mom, not, suddenly, a landlady who has put up with them long enough.

Hall’s performance follows the new, post-Dustin Hoffman line in Willy Lomans--that of the little guy fighting to be noticed by the world. We see the fight, and the moments when the fight is knocked out of him--Hall visibly sags when his boss (David Wohl) tells him he’s no longer needed on the road.

Hall makes his points, perhaps over-makes them. Willy comes off as a fussy character part, not as a han whom every breadwinner in the audience over 40 can identify with. In contrast, McDonald’s Biff seems a bit blank. It’s Wagrowski, with his Chicago accent, who seems to have been bumming around, maybe with a guitar around his neck.

Some of the nicest acting comes in the smaller parts--in particular, Ron Campbell as nerdish Bernard and Tom Rosqui as his cynical father, Charley. These two are a scandal to Willy, but a delight, obviously, to Miller, and their scenes have real charm.

Mark Wendland’s set is a three-decker affair, not quite expressionistic, but certainly not realistic--if so, the Lomans’ kitchen has the worst floor plan in the history of domestic architecture.

The effect is too much like a dollhouse to suit a play that has nothing cute about it, but Casey Cowan’s lighting remedies this: it establishes the play’s real setting as Willy’s troubled brain. This “Death of a Salesman” is fine--unless you want the details.

Performances at 514 W. 6th St., through Dec. 10. Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets $22-$26. (213) 627-5599.

‘DEATH OF A SALESMAN’

Arthur Miller’s play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Director Bill Bushnell. Set Mark Wendland. Lighting Casey Cowan. Costumes Marianna Elliott. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Original music Alex North. Stage manager Susan Slagle. With Philip Baker Hall, Edith Fields, Gregory Wagrowski, Christopher McDonald, Ron Campbell, Lynn Ann Leveridge, Tom Rosqui, Thomas Newman, David Wohl, Gina Elten, Kevin Symons, Saxon Trainor, Holly Wolfe.