Dennehy’s ‘Salesman’: Bigger Than Life on Small Screen

A man is not his line of goods, or “a piece of fruit,” as Willy Loman reminds (unsuccessfully) the boss about to fire him. Yet however painful the transaction, we continue to buy Arthur Miller’s most celebrated theatrical hard-sell, his hot air, humiliations and misguided love.

Filling a vacuum last season on Broadway, the one where the new plays should be, a 50th anniversary revival of playwright Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” ended up snagging four Tony Awards. It made a lot of people cry all over again for Willy, traveling salesman unextraordinaire, a broken soul about to unload his final line of wares. On Sunday, Showtime airs a taped version of that flawed, bellowing but powerful staging starring Brian Dennehy.

Dennehy serves as an executive producer of the Showtime edition, directed by Kirk Browning. The direction is essentially nonexistent; by design this is a straight-ahead look at the revival staged by Robert Falls, taped last November, one week after the close of the successful Broadway run.

You get the feeling that Dennehy and company gave more than their all for this taping, camera proximity be damned. But subtlety was never the strong suit of Falls’ production. Brute force was.

Theater fans in particular will want to check it out. This new “Salesman” won’t, however, give the idiosyncratic 1985 Dustin Hoffman “Salesman” a run for its money.

The Hoffman version, shrewdly tailored for a half-theatrical, half-cinematic universe by director Volker Schlondorff, allowed audiences to eavesdrop on what Miller’s own subtitle called “certain private conversations.” With Dennehy and company, it’s proscenium-theater battle all the way, waged by family members raging against the system, each other, themselves.

Certain things Dennehy did on stage become heightened here, and not for the better. He has a tendency to avoid eye contact with other actors, and some of the tortured-psyche gestures--the tugging at the lip, the pulling of the cheek, the latter called for by Miller’s own stage directions--indicate distress in obvious ways.

But in the big arias, and Miller wrote plenty, Dennehy connects. He’s especially shrewd at depicting anger on the cusp of panic. The big scenes give you an idea, at least, of why Elizabeth Franz proved such a revelation as Linda. Ron Eldard and Ted Koch, as Biff and Happy, are terrific throughout, pitch-perfect. Some of the supporting work is routine, and Falls’ direction tends to flatten the play’s dynamic range. Howard Witt’s Charley, though, is anything but routine--strong and direct and full of humor.

The taping doesn’t show much of Mark Wendland’s controversial (and misjudged) scenic design, the centerpiece of which is a revolving stage. On stage it slowed down the flashbacks haunting Willy. On TV, it’s an oddity.

The play itself is a granite-fisted stalwart, and Willy Loman is a big enough character to invite contrasting interpretations. In the little-circulated 1951 film, Fredric March (however impressive) couldn’t help but make the play seem like “Death of a Bank Manager.” Hoffman’s Willy went another way, to a more interior, muttering place. In football parlance, more often than not, the formidable Dennehy goes long--and scores.

* “Death of a Salesman” will be shown at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime. Repeats: 7 p.m. Wednesday, 5 p.m. Jan. 22 and 3:30 p.m. Jan. 28. The network has rated it TV-PG (violence, adult language, adult content).