"Death of a Salesman" returns to Broadway, making history as Black actors play the Lomans
NEW YORK - Nearly 75 years after Arthur MIller's "Death of a Salesman" was first on Broadway, a first: The Willy Loman family is African American.
The revival of the powerhouse play opens this Sunday.
CBS2's Dana Tyler spoke to the actors about what it's like for them telling this iconic story about a deluded husband and father's painful journey to live the American dream.
Wendell Pierce is Willy Loman, the aging Brooklyn salesman putting his past on a pedestal only to realize his faults put a successful career and his vision of a perfect family agonizingly out of reach.
Pierce is known for many screen roles, including "The Wire" and "Treme." "Death of a Salesman" is his fifth Broadway play, one making history with Black actors as the Lomans, instead of white.
"It is a profoundly moving honor to do the role. The challenge of a lifetime not only as an artist, but as a man, self-reflection: Are my best days behind me, what's important to me," Pierce said. "To do this work is... a challenge that I would have been crazy to turn down."
"It's timeless. It's timely. It's time," said Sharon D. Clarke.
Clarke co-starred with Pierce in the 2019 London production, winning an Olivier award as Willy's undaunted wife and mother of their two sons.
"Just like any actor, you bring who you are to the role. To have the Loman family be Black, it amplifies all those things that are already there on the page and brings it to a new level," Pierce said.
"Just heightens it, enriches it, deepens it. Because it's so visceral, you know, you can see the impossibility of the American dream and chasing that dream. It's not going to happen. You can see it," Clarke said.
Arthur Miller's play won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and quickly became iconic American literature.
"People coming to us afterwards, saying, 'Did you rewrite that? I've seen this play 1,000 times. I never heard that line,'" Pierce said. "They thought we had changed the script. But no, it was there."
This is the Broadway debut for director Miranda Cromwell, who won an Olivier Award as the play's co-director in London.
"The process of making theater is to step in other people's shoes, to consider what the same set of experiences are through a different lens, through a different body, through a different voice, through a different mind, with a different historical culture," Cromwell said.
Pierce says the more specific, the more universal the message becomes.