Rebirth of the Salesmen

Since February, when he opened the Broadway run of “Death of a Salesman,” Brian Dennehy has been described so often as “bear-like” that he might as well apply for dual-species citizenship. Same thing, different animal in the case of Kevin Spacey, a magnet for the feline metaphor, currently prowling the stage in the much-honored Broadway revival of “The Iceman Cometh.”

The heartening news for theatergoers: Dennehy and Spacey prove they’re more than the sum of their descriptions.

You can argue with some of the choices these two have made in portraying the haunted men of these plays. Yet each actor is an authentic, well-equipped creature of the stage. Together they constitute the most interesting race--and likely the closest--in tonight’s Tony Awards. (Brian O’Byrne, who stars in Martin McDonagh’s “The Lonesome West,” and Corin Redgrave in Tennesse Williams’ “Not About Nightingales” also were nominated.)

If Dennehy has the edge for best actor, “Iceman” is likely to win for best revival of a play. (See story, Page 8.) That covers the bases, from the voters’ point of view, and overall, director Howard Davies’ “Iceman” is the superior achievement, a rare bird captured with remarkable skill. Yet both productions deliver scenes, performances, moments so sharply realized, you know you’re seeing work you’ll remember a long time. Backed by some exquisite ensemble work, Spacey and Dennehy--not to mention Judi Dench, causing a box-office stampede in the mournful David Hare soaper “Amy’s View”--have gotten people talking about acting again. True, there’s criminally little these days in the way of musicals, new or old, to distract anyone from the subject. But it’s great to hear theatergoers arguing over a classic or two.

There’s also the attraction of their respective headlining movie stars, who happen to be actors as well. Box office clout aside, it’s gratifying to watch anyone venture onto the high wire, suspended above a dark emotional chasm, no net in sight. “Salesman” is a nearly three-hour high-wire act. “Iceman,” 4 1/4 hours. They demand real fearlessness, as well as the shrewdest salesmanship actors can muster.

Willy Loman and Theodore Hickman belong to the same nomadic breed, that of traveling salesmen, or “drummers,” as they were known in the earlier decades of the century. What’s painful, still, about Arthur Miller’s disintegrating Willy Loman--the reason he retains a chokehold on our sympathies--is the downfall of a drummer who has lost the beat, and who learned the wrong lessons in self-improvement and getting ahead in the first place.

A self-immolating human sparkler, Eugene O’Neill’s Hickey hasn’t lost the beat, exactly; by all accounts, despite his periodic benders, he’s better at his job than Willy is. He can size up anyone, any potential customer. Lately he has found a way to rid himself of false hopes, along with a wife so “sweet and good” she can only remind him of his own self-loathing.

What these salesmen are selling, audiences are buying. “Iceman” wraps up its sellout limited run July 17. Dennehy plans to continue with the popular Broadway “Salesman” through November and hopes to take the show to London next year, with some North American touring to follow, including a possible Ahmanson Theatre engagement.

The chief distinction of Spacey’s attack in “Iceman” is in his pacing. Like a more sardonic version of professor Harold Hill--coincidentally, “The Music Man” is set in 1912, the year of “The Iceman Cometh”--Spacey hits Harry Hope’s saloon running, literally, as well as running off at the mouth. The entrance is one of the most arresting in recent memory. Hickey doesn’t “appear” in the doorway, as indicated in O’Neill’s printed stage directions; instead Spacey’s salesman dashes onstage so quickly it’s as if he materializes out of nowhere. “Hello, gang!” he shouts, with more than a hint of menace. Spacey sets the tone for his performance in five seconds’ time.

Not long afterward, Spacey sneaks in another wonderful moment, an eerie hint of the depths Hickey has glimpsed lately. He’s talking to the uncomprehending rummies and tarts about “saving” them and bringing them peace by making them face the lives (and the lies) they’ve been living. “It’s just that I know from experience what a lying pipe dream can do to you,” Hickey says. The next line, preceded by a yawn (in O’Neill’s stage directions), is a simple “God, I’m sleepy all of a sudden.” Instead of a yawn, between lines Spacey stops dead in his verbal tracks; Hickey’s on the verge of nervous exhaustion. It’s a scarifying moment, over before you know it.

Unlike Spacey, Dennehy’s Willy Loman doesn’t go in for speed; Hickey would outgun Willy any day, in any town. Miller’s salesman was never about fast talk per se. He’s more of a lumpenprole, a backslapper who always tried a little too hard to ingratiate.

When first we see Dennehy, huge, looming, he has just kicked his own front door open, those fabled suitcases dragging him down. Backlighted, he seems utterly rooted to the place he has landed: back home. Yet he’s at odds with his surroundings, feeling “temporary” about himself.

By design, throughout this “Salesman,” we see a big, charismatic actor visually confined by scenic designer Mark Wendland’s teeny, box-like interiors. It’s an easy way to establish for the audience what’s going on in Willy’s head. Too easy. Even more problematic is Wendland’s ever-spinning turntable, which plays havoc with the sudden reality shifts within Willy’s brain. They’re supposed to be near-instantaneous, these shifts, but on that turntable every transition takes awhile. For better or worse, the scenic conception feeds into this production’s consciously elegiac quality.

The peak performances combat it. Dennehy worked for years in film and television and on stage before becoming officially well-known and, by audiences, well-liked, in movies such as “F/X” (1986). There he brought a roguish charm to a potentially routine role. His Irish satyr’s grin established his character as the master of his domain, on top of any situation. (Around the same time, Spacey got his own buzz going as the ultra-sleaze Mel Profitt on TV’s “Wiseguy.”)

In “Salesman,” part of Dennehy’s brute effectiveness comes from watching an actor wrestle with a role that can’t accommodate much in the way of a winner’s charisma. Yet playwright Miller’s foolish, striving man has star quality of a kind, especially here, as seen through the eyes of Elizabeth Franz’s superb Linda Loman (also Tony-nominated). Dennehy is especially fine when Willy’s on the verge of losing it, losing everything--his temper, his sanity, his self-respect--as in the scene with Howard, his old boss’ son. It’s one of several beautifully acted encounters in director Robert Falls’ staging. Here Dennehy blends pleading with bullying plus a dash of childlike horror, while keeping plenty in reserve. And in the climactic Act 2 square-off with his sons, when Dennehy hits words such as “spite,” it’s not just spite we hear. It’s a lifetime of suppressed pain, the last wail of a dying man.

Falls’ production opened last year at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, giving Dennehy and company a full warmup before New York. Spacey likewise broke in Davies’ “Iceman” last year, when the revival premiered in London. With Dennehy, you can’t help but wonder if, by now, he hasn’t allowed certain excesses to wander into his performance. Though it makes a certain amount of sense given Willy’s predicament, Dennehy rarely looks anyone in the eye on stage. (Not just here; I remember the same trait from other New York performances of his, among them Brian Friel’s “Translations” and the lovely Peter Brook revival of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.”) And Dennehy’s right hand sometimes appears to be bargaining for separate billing: It’s frequently off on its own somewhere, tugging at his lips and face. It’s a pretty easy way to indicate distress in a character.

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Similarly, Spacey’s “bughouse” nihilist does things you tend to experience as actorly choices rather than actorly choices tucked inside a characterization. The night I saw “Iceman,” Spacey raced certain passages so maniacally, you tended to tune out the meaning of the language. (Even so, it’s not all bad; O’Neill tended to blast his central motifs home over and over.) As for Hickey’s huge showpiece confessional near the end, Spacey made it fly--but you didn’t get the sense, finally, that Hickey was a changed, hollowed-out man by the end of it. Spacey’s a master of ironic counterpoint, of holding back. If he could find a way to puncture Hickey’s cagey reserve and self-control with a final, fatal jab or two, then a rich, witty performance could take on truly devastating dimensions.

So neither salesman’s pitch is perfect. How often does perfect come knocking? Spacey’s is the more distinctive performance, in the end. Dennehy’s has the greater visceral impact. That’s what Miller’s play is about, anyway, more so than O’Neill’s. “Salesman,” writes Miller in the preface to the 50th anniversary edition of the play, was the product of the late 1940s, a simpler time, he argues, when “a play worked or it didn’t, made them laugh or cry or left them bored.”

It’s all in the sell. “They were sports,” Hickey says, remembering the drummers who first snared his interest in the art of salesmanship. “They kept moving.” That’s Spacey’s attack in a few choice words.

“What could be more satisfying,” wonders Willy Loman, in the excruciating scene with his boss, “than to be able to go, at the age of 84, into 20 or 30 different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?” That’s success by the Loman standard. True contentment. Dennehy’s Loman cuts beneath the external bluff and certain external gestures, most affectingly in scenes such as this.

“There were promises made across this desk!” he bellows. How goods are bought and sold may change. The old-style drummer has marched on. But in both “Salesman” and “Iceman,” in Dennehy’s foursquare, rock-solid work and Spacey’s slippery approach, seeing a human being cornered like an animal still hurts.

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The 53rd annual Tony Awards will be broadcast tonight at 9 on CBS, preceded at 8 by the hourlong PBS presentation “Broadway ‘99: Launching the Tonys.”