A New ‘Salesman’ Pitch by Old Actor-Director Team

The last time Gerald Freedman directed Hal Holbrook they did “Uncle Vanya.” Before that it was “King Lear.” Now it’s “Death of a Salesman.”

Arthur Miller’s mid-century tragedy about a family devastated by the American dream, starring Holbrook as Willy Loman, opens Tuesday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts--capping a 13-week, seven-city national tour.

The reason for the pair’s extensive collaboration is not that they can’t get enough of each other, though they can’t, or even that they can’t get enough of the classics, which they also can’t.

For Holbrook, a household name at 69, it has to do with getting older, feeling tossed aside by Hollywood and putting meaning back into a Tony Award-winning acting career that had soured.

“Things happened in the ‘80s that made me feel bad,” said Holbrook, who is best known for playing Mark Twain. “I didn’t feel challenged. Gerry kind of got me going again. In 1990 he was instrumental in turning me back toward the theater.

“In the ‘70s in television, I had some really challenging stuff to do,” he said by telephone from Denver, where “Salesman” closed last week. “I had the roles. But once your hair starts turning gray--unless you’re one of the chosen few, the very few--you don’t get the parts. You can walk through most of the stuff they give you. To pull myself out of the depression I was in, I decided to take on the toughest parts I could think of.” For Freedman--no household name despite an unusually busy and wide-ranging directorial career--their collaboration also has to do with self-fulfillment and, in the case of “Salesman,” wanting to put Miller’s work back in the limelight.

“He’s a great writer, and we in this country are so casual in our treatment of him,” he said in a separate phone interview from North Carolina. “As Linda Loman says about Willy, ‘Attention must be paid.’ Miller has earned our respect. You can’t just toss off his writing the way they’ve done in New York. His work is transcendent. It will be good forever.”

Freedman is an old Miller hand. He directed the Broadway premiere of “The Creation of the World and Other Business” in 1972 and a revival of “The Crucible,” also on Broadway. But then Freedman, 69, is an old hand at directing a lot of things.

For more than a decade he was a leading director at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. During the 1960s he did the original “Hair” and “McBird!” there, more recently “Much Ado About Nothing” (starring Kevin Kline and Blythe Danner).

On Broadway, he has done Shavian comedy, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (Ruth Gordon, Lynne Redgrave), and musicals: “The Grand Tour” (Joel Grey), “The Robber Bridegroom” (Barry Bostwick), a revival of “West Side Story” co-directed with Jerry Robbins. He has even co-written a Broadway musical, “A Time for Singing” (albeit a flop).

High drama is also his cup of tea: “The Little Foxes” (Lee Grant, Carroll O’Connor and Burgess Meredith) at the former Westwood Playhouse in Los Angeles, “Blood Wedding” at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. He has thrived on operatic productions, moreover, staging nearly three dozen at the San Francisco Opera (including “Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk” and “La Boheme”) and the New York City Opera.

And when he’s not directing, Freedman divides his time between running a theater company (he’s artistic director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland) and a performing-arts conservatory (he’s dean of the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, N.C.).

It was in Cleveland that he and Holbrook first worked together. “I asked Hal to do ‘King Lear.’ ” Friedman says. “I think he’s a great American actor, and he needed great roles. There aren’t that many actors who have the equipment, the stamina, the genius really, that he has.”

Their “Lear” went so well, they remounted it at the Roundabout Theatre in New York. (Under Jack O’Brien’s direction, Holbrook did “Lear” again in 1993 at the Old Globe and the season before that Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.”)

But with “Death of a Salesman,” Freedman and Holbrook maintain that they’ve hit an artistic peak. Miller has seen this production twice on the road, in Miami and Boston.

“He’s taken a very personal interest in it,” Freedman says. “He went back and talked with the cast. He made notes and passed them on to us, many of which we’ve implemented.”

Freedman and Holbrook’s hope had been for producer Elliot Martin to take the show on to Broadway after Cerritos. But Miller “is a little gunshy of New York,” Freedman said, “and I think rightly so.” When “Death of a Salesman” was revived on Broadway in 1984, starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy and John Malkovich as Biff, it received mixed notices.

Holbrook agreed: “He’s very edgy about allowing his great play to be done there. He’s concerned about the level of criticism and the quality of the critics.”

Both director and actor are convinced, however, not only of “Salesman’s” supremacy in the American theater but of its historical prescience.

“We are all the children of Willy Loman today,” Holbrook said, “every damned one of us. We went for all the shiny crap, the surface, the one-dimensional junk. That’s the world Willy Loman bought into.”

Said Freedman: “The genius of this play is that Miller looked backward to what this nation was and forward to what it would become. Willy’s dream was built on a lot of fantasies: This is the land of opportunity. But Willy forgot that you have to earn it.”

* “Death of a Salesman” plays Tues.-Sunday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. $30 for remaining tickets.