Best Attentions

Elizabeth Franz plays Linda Loman in “Death of a Salesman”--so attention must be paid.

When Linda speaks those words in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, she’s talking about her husband--salesman Willy Loman, defending the defeated Everyman he has become in the twilight of his career.

“Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character who ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid,” Linda says in one of the play’s most often-quoted speeches.

But that line might as easily refer to the reaction of audiences to Franz’s startling reinvention of the character of Linda in the 50th anniversary revival of “Death of a Salesman,” which originated at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, went to Broadway and is now on stage at the Ahmanson Theatre.

Franz, appearing thin as a whisper and fragile as a sparrow opposite Brian Dennehy’s barrel-chested Willy, infuses a character--usually played as a depressed, beaten-down wife--with a fierce energy that not only got her name in the paper but also won her a 1999 Tony Award. The production received three other Tonys, for best revival of a play, best actor for Dennehy and best director for Robert Falls.

Said the New York Times of Franz’s Broadway performance: “Ms. Franz’s astonishing portrayal shatters that character’s traditional passivity to create a searing image of a woman fighting for her life, for that is what Willy is to Linda.”

Franz’s creative choices took even playwright Miller by surprise. “She discovered in the role the basic underlying powerful protectiveness, which comes out as fury, and that in the past, in every performance I know of, was simply washed out,” Miller said in a 1999 interview. “I don’t think [Miller] thought of it as being done that way, ever,” Franz says in a quiet, almost tremulous voice during an interview backstage at the Ahmanson. “We’ve got the most incredible ensemble going that I’ve ever experienced. People who jump off the cliff without a parachute--every one of us is very daring. It’s almost scary--the emotions are big, and they drive the play. Everybody’s taking a risk up there, it’s not the same every night.

“I was mugged in New York during the run of the play, but I only missed one performance, even though I was black and blue and all. I couldn’t wait; I wanted to be inside her world more than out in that world,” Franz says. “I wanted to be safe, inside Linda Loman. I wanted to get inside her strength, and it got me through a very hard time.”

And Franz had more in mind for her Linda than resilience. “The No. 1 thing I wanted to show in Linda and Willy’s relationship is a sexuality, a desire for one another,” Franz says. “That’s very important to her whole struggle; she says, ‘Willy, I want you upstairs, to come to bed.’

“When there’s a real love, it never stops. That kind of love--it’s hard to see an example of that these days. Staying together, and working it out, struggling together, working through it.”

‘It Just Broke His Heart’

Franz’s father was not a salesman--but she’s lived the Loman story. After 34 years working for B.F. Goodrich in Akron, Ohio, Franz’s father was “downsized” out of his job. “He had just turned 60,” she recalls. “It was horrifying--34 years, and they gave him a gold watch and no pension. It’s not even real gold--it’s gold-plated, and I don’t even know if it ever kept time. He died soon afterward; it just broke his heart.”

Franz also had two brothers--one who fought constantly with his father, the other a golden boy who could do no wrong--much like sons Biff and Happy in “Salesman.”

But Franz, now in her late 50s, borrowed more from her mother’s role in the family drama than she did from the literal parallels in their stories. Although her mother suffered from psychiatric problems, Franz says, she never lost her determination to preserve the family unit at all costs.

It was that strength that helped Franz decide to hang up Linda’s dishrag image. “You can see it in the play--the struggle to keep the family alive, especially through the woman,” Franz says. “I saw my grandparents do that with their children, and I saw my mother do that with us.

“When we’d have seminars with students about the play, they’d say, it’s about codependency, the dysfunctional family,” Franz continues. “He’s a ‘loser’--they’d use all those phrases.

“Well, in the time we are portraying, there were no words like that. Just to call this relationship dysfunctional or codependent is too easy. This gives you an excuse not to fight, not to understand, not to learn to love deeper. To accept the flaws, and find the strength in those flaws.”

Franz also borrowed on her mother’s strength when it came to her own decision to head for New York to pursue an acting career. “I always wanted to, since I was 5 years old,” she says. “I was shy, and nobody thought that it would happen, but little did they know that underneath that shyness was a great deal of steel.

“When I left, my mother said: ‘Well, I put in all the right ingredients; now I have to sit back and see whether you rise or fall, like a cake.’ Isn’t that a wonderful image? That’s what you see happening to Linda--she’s seeing that it’s falling, it’s falling, that she cannot fix the dysfunction between father and son.”

From Neil Simon to Sister Mary Ignatius

In Franz’s case, the cake rose high. Her lengthy list of credits on Broadway, in regional theater, and in film and television most recently includes portraying Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” opposite Sam Waterston--”I went from one comedy to another,” she jokes. On Broadway, she was nominated for a Tony for creating the role of Kate Jerome in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs”; off-Broadway, she won an Obie for creating the title role of the zany nun in “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You.”

Franz still notes, however, that’s it’s easy to feel like Willy Loman in show business, particularly for an actress older than 50. “All I want to do is act and represent these women that are inside of me,” she says. “But people keep telling me, ‘You’re not a household name, so we’re not going to use you.’ Yet when people come to the theater, they respond to the passion, and the honesty.

“That’s why I was very excited about doing this show out here, because it really speaks to an industry that really is about being bigger, the best, contacts--it’s not what you know, but who you know, all those things that Willy Loman says, that’s his American Dream. You hear people gasp, or the nervous laughter. . . . they see what happened to Willy Loman, and it doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to happen to them.”

Franz put off marriage--to actor Edward Binns--until she was 43; Binns died in 1990. She is now involved with a California screenwriter. But even though her choices are the polar opposite of a woman like Linda’s, she finds the message of the play perhaps even more urgent now than it was in 1949.

“We discussed that in the rehearsal so strongly, how to make this hopeful, [a production] that you have identified with it so much that you will change something and can make a difference,” she says.

“It’s exciting that we can re-look at, and reshape our lives today, based on a very old play. That’s what we set out to do.”

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* “Death of a Salesman,” Ahmanson Theatre, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Also Oct. 19, Oct. 26 and Nov. 2, 2 p.m. Ends Nov. 5. $15-$60. (213) 628-2772.