Death of a Salesman: A resonant tribute to Miller’s masterpiece
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-20th 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.
While Laflamme sets the benchmark here, others including Louis Lemire as Willy’s kind-hearted next-door neighbour Charley and Venetia Lawless as Willy’s round-heeled lady friend are also notable. The young actors Leslie Cserepy and Cory Thibert as Willy’s troubled sons Biff and Happy have some strong moments. Manon Dumas, alas, is out of her depth in the role of Willy’s wife Linda. Stiff and un-giving in her performance, she shows us little but the surface of a woman torn apart by the slow collapse of her husband and the gulf separating all four members of the family.
Directed by Lisa Zanyk, this production is a resonant tribute to Miller’s masterpiece.
Death of a Salesman continues April 3-5 at the Carleton Tavern, April 25 at Southminster United Church and May 1 at the Black Sheep Inn, Wakefield. Information: chambertheatrehintonburg.ca.