THEATER REVIEW : Getting Real With ‘Death of a Salesman’ : PCPA Theaterfest’s stunning production features leading regional performer James Edmondson as Willie Loman.

Willie Loman, the beaten-down dreamer in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” remains the archetypal casualty of that great American myth--the limitless possibilities of reinvented identity.

In the unbridgeable gulf between the self-aggrandizing distortions of Willie’s fantasies and the drudgery of his relentlessly bland world lies a tragedy as American as apple pie.

But while Loman’s life may play out as a pitiable negation of the Dale Carnegie ideal, there are still limitless possibilities in the oft-performed role for a great actor to rivet an audience.

That’s exactly what happens in PCPA Theaterfest’s stunning production of “Salesman,” with James Edmondson’s stellar turn as its centerpiece.

Edmondson, on loan from Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is firmly established as one of the country’s leading performers in regional theater. And in a performance that aches with dying dreams, Edmondson makes Willie’s tragedy our own.

From the moment he enters with shoulders sagging beneath the weight of his enormous sample kits, Edmondson’s grip on the character never falters. He nails the full range of Willie’s spectrum, whether soaring aloft with pumped-up optimism for a promotion he’ll never get or ranting at the latest breakdown amid the mediocre appliances he’s still paying off.

The subterranean faults that bring Willie down are stripped bare not only by the performance, but by the remarkably focused staging of director Paul Barnes. With heartbreaking clarity, the flashbacks establish the tiny fissures that will one day tear the Loman family to pieces: Willie’s unfounded bragging about his imagined accomplishments, the unrealistic praise he heaps on his son Biff, and his refusal to deal seriously with Biff’s stealing and cheating.

As Biff, actor Frederic Barbour smolders with the worst kind of defeated rage--the kind rooted in self-awareness. And his attempts to bring honesty to his relationship with Willie are made infinitely more painful by our knowledge that Willie is a lost cause.

A salesman who doesn’t realize that “the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell” is the way Willie’s friend Charley (Robert Vincent Frank, in an impeccable supporting performance) describes him, and in that central blindness is a failure both pathetic and all-too-human.

“We are all salesman,” Arthur Miller once said. Selling ourselves to our friends, our families, our employers in the hope that we can be “well-liked” (in Willie’s phrase), our own unrecognized flaws and unacted-upon values are a time bomb waiting to go off.

Watching that detonation occur with this much force is as real as theater gets.

Details

* WHAT: “Death of a Salesman.”

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays, matinees at 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays; through May 15.

* WHERE: Allan Hancock College Severson Theatre, Bradley and Stowell roads, Santa Maria.

* COST: $12 to $16.

* FYI: For reservations or information, call (800) 549-PCPA.