Hintonburg Chamber Theatre 2014 Archives - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Death of a Salesman: A resonant tribute to Miller’s masterpiece

By Patrick Langston | April 2, 2014

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – about the delusional, beaten-down anti-hero Willy Loman, a travelling salesman you’d not look twice at were you to pass him on the street – is a play at once timeless and specific, a story one instinctively relates to at the same time it’s a snapshot of the American dream embodied in one man and his family circa the mid-20^th century.

So Chamber Theatre Hintonburg’s decision to enact the play on a tiny stage at the Carleton Tavern, while creating staging problems, seems appropriate: a story writ large and small at the same time.

The centre of that story is Willy, and Donnie Laflamme gives us a richly realized characterization of this man whose disintegration you watch with the same slightly voyeuristic guilt you’d bring to watching a train wreck. Hope, anger, love, confusion: Willy’s mind is a tornado of emotion, and Laflamme captures it all in the passionate, loose-cannon style that is his acting trademark.

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Death of a Salesman: Runs like a well conducted symphony.

By Rajka Stefanovska | March 31, 2014

Venetia Lawless and Donny Laflamme

We all have a dream, don’t we? Sometimes, we turn our dreams into reality and other times, we simply lose ourselves in their pleasant, but non-existent world. The problem starts when we let the fiction in our minds overpower reality, just like Arthur Miller’s memorable character Willy Loman.

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is a story about this. It is a profound look on the so-called “American Dream” and the social standards that impose it. It is all in a dream: great success, huge achievements, big money… Yet, in reality each fulfilled dream comes at the cost of thousands of crushed ones and Miller put his finger on the reasons behind this. He speaks, through his characters, of how unrealistic goals bring self-alienation, estrangement and self-distraction. As Karl Jung says, the sub-conscience knows everything: the past, the present and the future; when and if the sub-conscience breaks the barrier of the conscious mind, madness might occur. Slowly, Willy Lomans’s sub-conscience gets into his reality, breaks through his strong denial system, reveals his true life for what it is, and darkens his mind. On his long way to self-destruction, helped by the unreserved support of his devoted and loyal wife, he unintentionally takes his two sons down with him. Finally, he realizes that he is more worth dead than alive (as his life insurance will bring money, socially the only recognized merit – one that he could not earn during his life). Therefore, he finds the solution to his crushed dreams in death.

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Death of a Salesman:Donnie Laflamme bathes the production in his electrifying presence.

By Alvina Ruprecht | March 28, 2014

Donnie Laflamme as Willy Loman. Photo. Alvina Ruprecht

Willy Loman is the ultimate tragic hero of the contemporary American stage. His appearance in 1949 confirmed Arthur Miller as one of America’s greatest playwrights of the post-war period along with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neil. The Chamber Theatre of Hintonburg has always been drawn to the special kind of expressionist laced realism of American theatre. Their production of Miller’s A View From the Bridge two years ago(at the Elmdale Tavern) won a CCC best professional actor award for Donnie Laflamme whose performance of the emotionally tortured father, was almost unbearable to behold .

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