Attention Is Being Paid

“Death of a Salesman’s” Willy Loman is among the most recognizable figures in American theater. Brian Dennehy is among the screen’s most recognizable character actors. But putting the two men together may not immediately come to mind.

It does, however, if you’re Robert Falls. The artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre has proven many times over the years that Dennehy could portray considerably more than burly cops, serial killers and genial aliens.

Their “Death of a Salesman” comes to the Ahmanson Theatre on Wednesday, capping a working relationship that goes back more than 15 years.

When Falls took over as artistic director of the Goodman in 1986, he immediately mounted Brecht’s “Galileo” and cast Dennehy in the title role. “It’s a play I wanted to do my whole life,” Falls recalls, “but I never met an actor who had the size, sensuality and intellectual abilities.”

Falls says Dennehy made an “astonishing” Galileo. So astonishing, in fact, that he brought Dennehy back to star in O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” and “A Touch of the Poet,” or, as Falls puts it, “three monster roles in three monster plays.”

Then a few years ago, Falls and Dennehy had dinner together when the actor visited Chicago from his farm in Connecticut. As they walked away from the restaurant, Falls says, he noticed something different about the “bigger-than-life, heroic, kingly actor.”

“Brian was going to have knee surgery and he was hobbling along. I looked over at him, getting ready to turn 60, tired, his legs hurting him, and I had an image of Willy Loman.”

The actor wasn’t so sure. Not only had they both seen the play a dozen times, remembers Falls, but both knew Dennehy would be following in the footsteps of Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott and Dustin Hoffman.

Dennehy, who inhabited Arthur Miller’s salesman first in Chicago, then on Broadway, needn’t have worried. His performance in what became “Salesman’s” 50th-anniversary production won him a 1999 Tony Award. New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote that Dennehy played Loman “with majestic, unnerving transparency--[conveying] a grand emotional expansiveness that matches his monumental physique.”

That physique is, after all, the first thing you notice about Dennehy. Wedged at a conference table after rehearsal, the 62-year-old actor looks even more imposing off-screen than on. His enormous shoulders are clearly those of a college football player, which he was.

Dennehy’s the first to admit that his size has helped make him a popular casting choice for bad guys and the cops who pursue them. Leaning across the table, smiling, he says, “Look--what am I going to play? I’d love to play Nureyev, but I’m not the first name that leaps to mind.”

So he plunges again and again into theater, where he started more than 30 years ago. Though his Broadway debut didn’t come until 1995 with Brian Friel’s “Translations,” it was Dennehy’s work in the ‘80s in Ron Hutchinson’s play “Rat in the Skull,” at Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge Theatre, that first intrigued Falls.

Playwright Miller recalls seeing Dennehy in Peter Brook’s production of “The Cherry Orchard” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1988 and being “quite surprised. I’d only seen him on television or in films, and it was a very sensitive and intelligent performance.” Later, in Chicago to see Dennehy’s work in “Salesman,” Miller says he was both “happy and relieved. He’s wonderful in the part.”

Though Falls cast mostly Chicago-based actors in “Salesman,” he brought in Elizabeth Franz from New York to play Willy’s wife, Linda Loman. “He told me I was going to meet the [dramatic] match of my life,” Franz says. “And it was true. You immediately fall in love with him. You want to support him and be his mate forever.”

Franz, who also won a Tony for her performance in the show, is here bound to a man whose internal as well as external world is crashing around him. The emphasis in this production is on Loman’s emotional life, and Dennehy plays him as a man burdened by mental as well as financial problems.

During rehearsals in Chicago, Dennehy says, he wanted to know more about such things as bipolar personality and depression. The Goodman dramaturges, he says, provided him with information from psychiatrists. The actor went on to incorporate assorted hand gestures, facial expressions and other mannerisms he says he has cut back over time.

“At some point, you try to distill it, and some of that went away,” Dennehy says. “But some of it stayed. There’s the whole sense of fragility, of the world becoming a darker place and a place he doesn’t recognize or understand anymore.”

Although Falls says that Dennehy offered to step aside for a “bigger star” when the show was headed for Broadway, Falls demurred. Dennehy took the stage exactly 50 years after Cobb’s debut as Loman at the Morosco Theatre on Feb. 10, 1949. “Salesman” would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for the then-33-year-old Miller and be performed continually throughout the world.

Dennehy and Cobb “were both immense men,” says Miller. “I’ve learned over the years that can help doing that part just as it probably helps a lot when doing Lear. When something large falls, it makes a larger impact. We generally associate a kind of brute strength with size of that kind. When a large man has that sensitivity, it’s very moving.”

Dennehy praises Miller and his play many times during an interview, using the word “privilege” again and again to describe his feeling about playing Loman. “So many people out there are so moved by it, so affected by it, in so many similar ways that you have to say, ‘Of course, it’s a great work of art.’ Which it is.

“I’ve never been involved in a play or a movie or anything where the audience night after night after night sees their own lives onstage. People come backstage crying. And it’s not so much about the tragedy of Willy, but about themselves, and their own fathers, uncles or whatever.”

Dennehy’s own father, he says, was no Willy Loman, although he feels his journalist father never did get the respect or income he deserved. Dennehy’s younger brother, Michael, was in the FBI for 30 years until he retired, leading Dennehy to observe that “there’s a thing about Irish Catholics and service. My father was a Jesuit. He had a Jesuit attitude toward the Associated Press and my brother to the FBI. That generation--my generation--[were] cops, firemen, civil servants, administrators. It’s changing, but it was true then.”

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Born in Bridgeport, Conn., Dennehy grew up in Brooklyn and Mineola, N.Y., in what he calls “a real Irish Catholic family.” Encouraged by a teacher, he first got a taste of acting at 13, but “it was years before I got back to it, for various reasons. What great teachers do is open a window and say, ‘Look over here: This is a possibility.’ ”

It took a while. He headed for Columbia University on a football scholarship, leaving for a few years to serve as a Marine in Lebanon and the Dominican Republic. Back at Columbia after the Marines, he majored in history, graduating in 1965. He acted at night, earning a living at “all that stuff you see on book-jacket covers of guys who write adventure novels. Unlike the typical Brandeis theater grad, I didn’t have to do research on being a truck driver or bartender.”

Dennehy worked on Wall Street--”when the Dow was at 500 or 600”--but, he concedes, “I was the worst broker. Actually, everything I did I was terrible at. But I was always acting. I was always working in theater and trying to figure out some kind of a clawhold.”

Things changed in the early ‘70s. Appearing in an off-off-Broadway production of Chekhov’s “Ivanov,” Dennehy got good notices and an agent, and soon started being cast in movies and TV. At the time, he says, his three daughters--actresses Elizabeth and Kathy and psychologist Deirdre--were headed for college, “so I was probably not so clever about my career. I was just trying to make some money. The great thing is it was there and available. Suddenly I was making a living being an actor, which is no mean accomplishment.”

Actor Richard Masur, former president of the Screen Actors Guild, recalls meeting Dennehy when both were in Dallas for the 1978 film “Semi-Tough.” “I told [my agent] Susan Smith, ‘I want you to meet someone. His name is Brian Dennehy. There’s nobody else like him, and he will never ever be out of work.’ ”

Smith soon signed him, and time proved Masur right. Dennehy played Gen. Leslie Groves on CBS’ “Day One” in 1989, Teamster President Jackie Presser on HBO’s “Teamster Boss” in 1992 and serial killer John Wayne Gacy in TV’s “To Catch a Killer” in 1992. His extensive film work includes “The Belly of an Architect,” “Presumed Innocent,” “10,” “Gorky Park,” “Silverado,” “First Blood,” “F/X” and “Cocoon.”

“I think Brian’s work operates on two levels,” Masur says. “The general public responds to his intellect and his physical power and also, frankly, to that incredible smile and twinkle in his eye. When actors watch Brian work, I think, we’re seeing a lot more of what goes into creating a performance rather than just being knocked out by the overall experience.”

As far back as “The Jericho Mile,” in which he played a neo-Nazi at Folsom Prison, Dennehy spent a lot of time studying and learning how people like that behaved, says Michael Mann, who co-wrote and directed the 1979 TV film.

“Going that deep into character takes risks,” Mann says, “and you only find that with great actors. They’re unself-conscious and have the courage to project themselves out there onto the edge. And that’s Brian, all over. He just goes for it.”

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Asked if he’s getting more calls since winning the Tony Award, Dennehy shrugs. “Maybe a little bit. If Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, John Goodman and three or four others say no, they may get around to me.

“If you’re a 60-year-old character actor, guys in towers at Universal and Warner Bros. are not jumping out of bed in the morning saying, ‘What can we get for Brian Dennehy?’ But I’m not complaining. There are times I’m right for a part and get to play it, and there are times when I’m not.”

Writer-producer David Rintels, who first met Dennehy on the set of Rintels’ TV movie “Day One,” says, “Some people may cast him because he’s physically so imposing, but they get so much more. They get intelligence and passion. His opinions are informed and very strong, but he’s open-minded and he loves to debate. Good talk is food and drink to him. He’ll stay up all night talking if he has the chance.”

Probably not while he’s playing Willy Loman. Even sitting around a table the first day of rehearsal here was grueling, Dennehy says. “We were reading the play [aloud], and by halfway through, we were all wiped out. We looked at each other, and Ron [Eldard] and I, when we came to the last scene, both said, ‘There’s no way we’ll be able to do this.’ ”

Asked how he stays in shape for what he has called “the American Lear,” Dennehy laughs out loud, asking, “Do I look like I stay in shape for anything?

“I wish that I was properly prepared physically and vocally for this, but I’m not and I never was. You try to get your rest and you try to take care of yourself, but it’s very very tough.

‘When people say to me, ‘How do you manage to do this twice in a day,’ you say to yourself, ‘Well, I’m tired. My voice is tired.’ But I don’t have the feeling that I really did anything. There is an element with this play of standing on the station platform. The train pulls in, the door opens, you get on it and it takes you away.”

Still, Dennehy concedes that just before heading west, “I was saying to myself, I wish I could stay home with my family [second wife Jennifer and children Cormac, 7, and Sarah, 5] and go sailing, but then you get up in that rehearsal room and you start playing one of those scenes. It’s why I’ve been doing this so many years.”

Dennehy and “Salesman” will go next to St. Louis and Boston for short runs this fall. The actor also hosts “Arrest & Trial,” a new reality-based syndicated TV series, starting Oct. 2, and says he and his producing partner, Patricia Clifford, have some projects coming up, mostly for television.

He and Falls are also looking ahead to their next collaboration, probably O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” although Dennehy notes he’d need a long preparation time because “I’d have to lose 50 pounds to do it.” While neither man is ready to say when they might tackle that production, Dennehy says he would like to again start in Chicago, “and see what happens.

“When we did ‘Death of a Salesman,’ I thought it would never go to New York. There is no irony in it. There’s not much in Arthur Miller, and we live in ironic and cynical times. My judgment was that [Broadway audiences] wouldn’t sit still for a play about people who destroy themselves with love and expectations and ambitions and failure--all those old-fashioned American strengths and weaknesses. I was wrong, and I’m glad I was wrong.” *

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“Death of a Salesman” opens Wednesday. Regular times: Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m., and Sundays, 2 p.m. through Nov. 5. Additional performances: Thursdays, Oct. 5, 19, 26 and Nov. 2 at 2 p.m. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. $15-$60. (213) 628-2772.

Barbara Isenberg is a regular contributor to Calendar. Her oral history, “State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work,” will be published by William Morrow next month.