Masterful ‘Salesman’-ship

Brian Dennehy’s Willy Loman does not just drag himself home from his final trip on the road of disappointed smiles and futile shoeshines. He crashes open the huge, eerily disconnected door with one last big kick, then stands looming in the doorway--for a heartbeat--like a man-mountain action hero on a final mission.

This Willy does not merely rest his weary body and sample cases in the Brooklyn kitchen that is both sanctuary and stifling dead-end. Suddenly, in Robert Falls’ magnificent 50th anniversary re-imagining of Arthur Miller’s monumental “Death of a Salesman,” Willy looks too big for his tiny, cramped domestic life. The chairs seem too small for his hulk, desperately grandiose even in defeat, and the walls are way too thin to hold his family’s secrets, not to mention all those screwed-up dreams.

The ads for Wednesday night’s opening at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre read, “Feb. 10, 1949, history is made. Tonight at 6:30, history is repeated.” And, though little about the familiar masterwork feels like repetition, this “Salesman” has not been oversold. The production, which comes almost intact from Falls’ Goodman Theatre in Chicago, with the marvelous Elizabeth Franz as an angry and used-up, supportive Linda. It is a harrowing, expressionistic swirl that--in Mark Wendland’s smart turntable-haunted settings--takes us back and forth, inside and out of the everyman dilemmas and the vast labyrinthian paths of Willy’s crumbling mind.

Remarkably little seems forced in this brutally hallucinatory yet intimate revival of the landmark drama, just voted No. 2 on the millennial hit parade (after Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”) on a survey by England’s National Theatre. Dennehy--acclaimed for his O’Neill and Brecht in Chicago but little known on stage here--is devastating in the role big enough to have ensnared actors from Lee J. Cobb in 1949 to Dustin Hoffman in 1984. Hoffman’s highly anticipated Willy was thoughtful, small and studied, his destruction more like the death of an accountant than of a glad-handing salesman from the road.

Dennehy, almost another species entirely, is loaded with hollow bravado, with shadows of swagger from a lifetime of hotshot self-delusion. With Kevin Anderson as Willy’s derailed son Biff, these Lomans are a lot more Irish than Miller’s Brooklyn Jews. But second-generation immigrant disillusionment knows no limits, and Dennehy, who towers over everyone on stage, seems to be looking over people’s heads at something that transcends the neighborhood. His gaze often has the faraway, knowing vitality of a lifelong blind man. A big man, he takes a big fall.

The 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner remains one of America’s few truly great dramas, one that challenges middle American values without losing the very people it is shredding. There isn’t an unnecessary line in what Miller originally subtitled “private conversations in two acts and a requiem.” Every sentence reveals character. Each action demands reaction.

Despite few surprises, the work still challenges our values with rare compassion. “Salesman” is an indictment of the American dream, materialism and the loss of respect for simple work. Yet it’s also rich with human peculiarities. Willy’s not just some good guy the system squashed. He’s a hypocrite, a climber, a dreamer with the wrong dreams. Yet, though his values are phony, the recriminating ghosts are very real.

Anderson and Ted Koch are fine as Willy’s drifting sons, Biff and the woman-chasing Happy, though both characters offer more introspective danger than we see here. But the smaller roles are exquisitely cast. Howard Witt makes Charley, the disapproving neighbor, into a major force of morality and perspective. Kate Buddeke makes Willy’s other woman into a real woman, not just some tart he picks up on the lonely road. Steve Pickering has just the right obnoxious helplessness as the young boss who calls Willy “kid,” and Allen Hamilton manages not to make the ghost of Willy’s dead, buccaneering brother, Ben, into a Kentucky Fried Chicken salesman. Richard Thompson is encouraged to make the smart kid, Bernard, into a cartoon parody of the character we now know was modeled after Miller himself, but the nerdy boy is allowed to grow up into a believable man.

Birgit Rattenborg Wise’s costumes have all sorts of unobtrusive touches, including pencils in Willy’s vest pocket. Richard Woodbury’s new edgy, jazzy music can be distracting at times. But how telling. Where Miller asks for a flute at the opening, a sound “small and fine” telling of grass and trees and the horizon, Falls and Woodbury give us horns and drums and the noise of encroaching cities.

That opening also has the voice of Franz’s Linda--who delivers Willy’s shattering eulogy while lying on his grave--as an echo of voices from a dreamlike vastness. He answers, reassuringly, “It’s all right. I came back.” Indeed he has.

* “Death of a Salesman,” Eugene O’Neill Theatre, 230 W. 49th St., New York. Telecharge: (800) 432-7250.