For the love of the Lomans

'Death of Salesman' production focuses on family bonds

By Julie Baxter, Enterprise Staff Writer
August 17, 2005

The falibility of the American Dream is no longer controversial.

Decades after Arthur Miller wrote his 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Death of a Salesman," the dream has been exposed as part myth, part fairy tale, part wishful thinking.

In its day, the concept of a hard-working man not receiving the respect or the reward he was assured was shocking, even scandalous to some. Today, Enron, WorldCom, defunct pension funds and broken promises have made Willy Loman less fictional character and more modern everyman.

He is the picture of what most of us strive for — to be respected, to be loved, to be noticed.

"I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him," Willy's wife, Linda, says in one of the play's most memorable and most often repeated lines.

Lamenting his sparsely attended funeral, she goes on, So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

That graveside speech reveals the heart of Miller's classic — a family's love born, grown and tested inside the walls of a small frame house. It still means as much in 2005 as it did in 1949.

So says David Riley, the driving force behind the latest production of "Salesman" on stage in Denver through month's end.

"It's a love story," Riley said of the play — the love story of a family, the love story of a father and his sons.

And a bit like the love story of Riley and his father, who traveled 10 months of the year while his boy was the quarterback for his small town high school team.

"Salesman" is a play Riley said he always dreamed of staging. And almost immediately on the heels of Miller's death in February, the former MGM executive started working to make his dream reality via 2-year-old Denver Repertory Theatre company, which he founded in 2003 after moving from Los Angeles. Also a part of the equation was the Lafayette Community Players.

The culmination of that work has been on stage all month, with the first shows in Lafayette at the historic Mary Miller Theater. The play has since moved to the John Hand Theater in Denver, where it will be performed this weekend and next before closing its run.

Not quite a partnership, the collaboration with the community theater group has expanded the audience for the play and put the theater groups on the radar of those who might not know of their existence, said Madge Montgomery, artistic director for the Lafayette Community Players and director of "Salesman."

"I don't think people in (the north metro area) are familiar with Denver Repertory and Denver people don't know anything about Lafayette Community Players," she said. "We were able to reach a broader audience."

But despite being unfamiliar with one theater or another, audiences might have noticed some familiar faces.

"I wasn't anticipating it would be this way, but within the cast the majority of people had already worked with both groups," Montgomery said.

Such familiarity bred comfort, Montgomery said, but not so much that she wasn't a bit intimidated by tackling what she called one of the best American plays ever written that has a long list of brilliant productions.

She, like Riley, latched on to the love story after a fresh reading of "Salesman."

"Looking at the play today, I think we already kind of accept that there are winners and losers in American society, that part of it is less shocking now," Montgomery said. "What is enduring about the play is the relationships within the Loman family, a family dealing with circumstances much larger than themselves. It's the universal that we're focusing on."

Most analysis didn't keep in step with her romantic approach, until she read something Miller wrote about the play.

"He called it a love story," she said. "I really believe that's what it is — a love story about the family."

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