![]() He asks Willy to leave the office ("I've got people here to see and I need the room"), then fires Loman, who worked for his father. "Aren't you supposed to be in Boston?" Howard asks coldly after showing off his new wire recorder. Willy quotes a figure that he can live with but twice violates the first rule of negotiations, "Never cut your price." Howard, bound up with flaunting his wealth, sees Willy as a liability to the company. ![]() Willy works up the courage to ask his boss, Howard Wagner, that he be taken off the road. Ben is literally a head taller than Willy, and, traveling a road not taken, Willy sees that he could have made the same fortune. Willy's older brother, Ben, is a tycoon after extensive travels in Alaska. He might be happier working on a ranch but is driven to earn his father's respect. I'm lonely."īiff, we are told, is a former athlete whose life went off track after failing math his senior year and dropping out of summer school when he saw Willy with another woman on a visit to Boston. My own apartment, a car, plenty of women, and still. Happy, the younger, says "I don't know what the hell I'm working for. Willy's two sons also appear gripped by the same general malaise. Bernstein, Charles Foster Kane's former business manager (played on the screen by Everett Sloane) in Orson Welles' 1941 masterwork "Citizen Kane." Old age, he said, is "the only disease that you don't look forward to being cured of." "Something terrible is happing to him," Linda tells her sons in the first act. He and Linda have two children, Biff and Happy, although as Willy drifts into senility, one can hardly call it a happy household. Willy has worked the Northeast territory, that 700-mile stretch today connected by Amtrak's Acela route, for years, perhaps too long to note the passage of time. That line is uttered in act one by Linda Loman, the long-suffering wife of the play's lead character, Willy Loman, the salesman referred to in the title. When a local troupe takes on a production like this, attention must be paid, to use an oft-quoted line from Miller's 1949 play. With considerable interest, I attended a local production of Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Death of a Salesman" on Sunday afternoon at Pocket Community Theatre (Ramble Street, off Park Avenue). Toss Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams into the mix, shuffle the order any way you like, and come up with a fourth (Edward Albee or David Mamet?) for the Mount Rushmore of the American stage. Had he not wed Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller still would be recognized as one of America's greatest playwrights.
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