‘Death of a Salesman,’ With Philip Seymour Hoffman

The curtain rises, and the floodgates open. How could it be otherwise? Because suddenly it’s all there before you: that set, that music and, above all, that immortal silhouette — the shadowed figure of a stooped man with sample cases, heavy enough to contain a lifetime’s disappointments.

Any passionate student of American theater is sure to get the shivers in the opening moments of Mike Nichols’s revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” which opened on Thursday night at the Barrymore Theater. Mr. Nichols — the enduringly fertile, award-laden director of stage and screen — had seen “Death of a Salesman” as a teenager some 60 years ago.

In an inspired choice he decided that for this revival, which stars a deeply thoughtful and uncomfortably cast Philip Seymour Hoffman, he would recreate the original visual and aural landscape devised by the set designer Jo Mielziner and the composer Alex North. So what you’re seeing and hearing at this production’s beginning is much what audiences at the Morosco Theater must have experienced in 1949. It’s a beautiful, lyrical, ghostly vision — appropriate to a play in which an idealized past haunts an unforgiving present. I thank Mr. Nichols for vouchsafing us that glimpse of a watershed opening night in American drama, an uncommon gift from one theater lover to many others.

Yet the tears that brimmed in my eyes in those initial wordless moments receded almost as soon as the first dialogue was spoken. And at the production’s end I found myself identifying, in a way I never had before, with the woman kneeling by a grave who says, “Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry.”

Mr. Nichols has created an immaculate monument to a great American play. It is scrupulous in its attention to all the surface details that define time, place and mood. (Ann Roth’s costumes and Brian MacDevitt’s lighting feel utterly of a piece with Mielziner and North’s original contributions.) And as staged and paced it is perhaps the most lucid “Salesman” I’ve ever seen.

As the story of the last, deluded days of Willy Loman (Mr. Hoffman) is spun out, Miller’s patterns of imagery fit into place with clean, audible clicks. Lines of thematic import seem to be chiseled into marble before our eyes. You admire every detail of construction and leave the Barrymore feeling that you have learned something of worth, dutifully noting the parallels between Miller’s portrait of failed American dreams and our own disenchanted times. It’s all rather like visiting an important national landmark.

Such emotional distance sprang, for me at least, from a feeling of disconnection between the leading actors (all, I would argue, miscast) and their characters. The three names above the title for this production all belong to people whose work I have greatly admired: Mr. Hoffman, as Willy, the Brooklyn salesman; Linda Emond as Linda, his protective wife; and Andrew Garfield as Biff, their 34-year-old son, an athletic hero in high school who has never found his place in life.

Mr. Hoffman, Ms. Emond and Mr. Garfield all bring exacting intelligence and intensity to their performances. They make thought visible, but it’s the thought of actors making choices rather than of characters living in the moment. Their reading of certain lines makes you hear classic dialogue anew but with intellectual annotations. It’s as if they were docents showing us through Loman House, now listed on the Literary Register of Historic Places.

That Mr. Hoffman is one of the finest actors of his generation is beyond dispute. His screen portraits, whether in starring roles (like his Oscar-winning turn in “Capote”) or supporting ones (“The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Boogie Nights”), are among the most memorable of recent decades. Though he was brilliant in the 2000 revival of Sam Shepard’s “True West,” his stage work has been more variable.

Certainly his performance here is more fully sustained than those in “The Seagull” (for Mr. Nichols) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” But as a complete flesh-and-blood being, this Willy seems to emerge only fitfully. His voice pitched sonorous and low, his face a moonlike mask of unhappiness, he registers in the opening scenes as an abstract (as well as abstracted) Willy, a ghost who roams through his own life. (And yes, at 44, Mr. Hoffman never seems a credible 62.)

Mind you, there are instances of piercing emotional conviction throughout, moments you want to file and rerun in memory. Mr. Hoffman does terminal uncertainty better than practically anyone, and he’s terrific in showing the doubt that crumples Willy just when he’s trying to sell his own brand of all-American optimism. (His memory scenes with his self-made brother, played by John Glover, are superb.) What he doesn’t give us is the illusion of the younger Willy’s certainty, of the belief in false gods.

For “Salesman” to work as tragedy (for which it does qualify), there has to be a touch of the titan in Willy, of the hope-inflated man that his sons once worshiped, so we feel an ache of loss when all the air goes out of him. That was what Brian Dennehy offered (some felt to excess) in Robert Falls’s marvelous 1999 production. Mr. Hoffman’s Willy is preshrunk.

Ms. Emond’s Linda, on the other hand, comes across not as the usual devoted doormat but as a big, brimming life force. This is not a woman who has been worn down by cares; she’s a vigilant, fire-breathing watchdog of her husband’s ego. And when she erupts into anger with her grown sons, it’s as if that speech (the much-quoted one in which she says, “Attention must be paid”) had been soapbox-ready for ages.

Though Mr. Garfield (“The Social Network”) brings searing heat to Biff’s Oedipal confrontations with his father, he is hard to credit as a golden, fading American dream incarnate, a natural man of the earth who belongs in the great outdoors. (He’s more like the weedy, tormented James Dean of “Rebel Without a Cause.”) And when he, Ms. Emond and Mr. Hoffman assemble into family tableaus, it’s as if you are watching characters digitally woven together from different movies.

Two performances stand out, luminous and palpable, for their authenticity. As Happy, the younger son forever in pursuit of Dad’s affection, Finn Wittrock provides a funny, poignant and ripely detailed study in virile vanity as a defense system. Bill Camp, as Charley, Willy’s wisecracking next-door neighbor, wears on his face an entire lifetime of philosophical compromises, small victories and protective cynicism. And he speaks so deeply from character that he makes even a line like “Nobody dast blame this man” sound as natural as “hello.”

At the end of this “Salesman” I felt that I understood Willy and Linda and Biff, and was grateful for the insights that the actors playing them had offered. But I felt I knew Happy and Charley, that I might run into them on the street after the show. I also felt for them. The gap between those two sets of reactions explains why “Salesman,” now and forever a great play, never quite achieves greatness on the stage this time around.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By Arthur Miller; directed by Mike Nichols; sets by Jo Mielziner; costumes by Ann Roth; lighting by Brian MacDevitt; sound by Scott Lehrer; hair and wig design by David Brian Brown; makeup by Ivana Primorac; music by Alex North; music supervisor, Glen Kelly; scenic design prepared by Brian Webb; fight director, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Jill Cordle; production manager, Aurora Productions; general manager, STP/Patrick Gracey. Presented by Scott Rudin, Stuart Thompson, Jon B. Platt, Columbia Pictures, Jean Doumanian, Merrit Forrest Baer, Roger Berlind, Scott M. Delman, Sonia Friedman Productions, Ruth Hendel, Carl Moellenberg, Scott and Brian Zeilinger and Eli Bush. At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Through June 2. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.

WITH: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Willy Loman), Linda Emond (Linda Loman), Andrew Garfield (Biff Loman), Finn Wittrock (Happy Loman), Fran Kranz (Bernard), Remy Auberjonois (Howard Wagner), Glenn Fleshler (Stanley), Stephanie Janssen (Miss Forsythe), Brad Koed (Second Waiter), Kathleen McNenny (Jenny), Elizabeth Morton (Letta), Molly Price (the Woman), Bill Camp (Charley) and John Glover (Ben).